late wrote:
It all goes back to income inequality.
Well, at least in reality it does.
In the American bailout, first thing they did was give the rich close to a trillion, money they didn't need.
So sure, a lot of the rich are Boomers. But they are less than 1% of the Boomers. So you are over 99% wrong.
FYI, modern economists don't think beggaring thy neighbor is a smart thing to do...
SolarCross wrote:
Millions of boomers outweigh one or two hyper-rich guys who are also boomers most likely. The facts are, the boomers are taking more than their fair share and they are taking it from their children and their children's children. It is the boomers doing the beggaring actually.
I believe you said that retirees have a larger average income than full time workers. I don't know if it is true but let's accept it and see what we can say to make it worthless.
1] If by 'retired' you are including everyone over 65 years old then you are including almost all the super rich and excluding the rest of them who live off their investments as non full-time workers. When you do an average of
5+5+5+10+100 you get 125/5 =25. Or, 5+5+5+10+1000 you get 1025/5 =205. This is just an example to illustrate the meaninglessness of averaging the super rich into many others.
2] Do you remember the analogy that goes like this? A rich guy, a poor guy, and a doctor are sitting at a table with a cake. The rich guy cuts the cake into 90% and 10% pieces, takes to 90% piece and says to the others, "You can have the rest."
. . . So, in our case the doctor might be the retired and the workers the poor guy.
. . . The Boomers now, in over half the cases, live off Soc. Sec. and they have made double payments since 1983 to fill up the Soc. Sec. Trust Fund. We are not going to look kindly at a politician who cuts our benefits because we paid for our fathers and made payments for ourselves for up to 37 years. The other income Boomers are getting are from pensions and investments that they made with after tax money they earned.
. . . OTOH, workers are being screwed by the rich not by all Boomers. Working Boomers did not like NAFTA, they did not like it that real wages have been flat for 37 years and the CPI does not accurately track the effect of inflation on the standard of living of workers. [This is what he meant about workers earning less now that they did in the 80s.] Working Boomers didn't want any of the many changes that caused the decline of workers real wages over the last 39 years.
. . . So, yes, there are a few Boomers who did want those things but they were not the majority of Boomers. However, apparently they were the ones who mattered.
Thomas Frank got it right. He says that starting about in 1990 the Democratic Party decided to screw the workers and work for the top 15% of earners. They thought that the workers had nowhere else to go. That 3rd parties are not allowed in a 1st past the post voting system and the workers would not vote for the Repubs because they were obviously worse for the workers than the Dems intended to be.
. . . And, that did NOT work out well for the Dems at all after 2009. By then the workers were catching on to the swindle. They began to vote based on other issues when it became clear that the Dems would not work for them (workers) economically, so why vote for them. So, they voted against gun control, or against abortion, or against affirmative action,or against gender issues, etc. That is, those workers voted for the Repuds. so, after 2009 the Dems were crushed in 2010 and after that at the local, state, and national levels. Over and over again. And Pres. Obama was, like Pres. Clinton, one of the Boomer Dems who worked for the top 15% of earners and screwed the workers and college students. IIRC, Pres. Obama even put Soc. Sec. on the table in an effort to get the Repuds to come the the table and work together on a plan. The Repuds refused, but some retired people heard him no doubt and decided to vote for Trump because he promised changes and Obama and the Dems had signaled that they *are* willing to throw the retirees under the buss.
The current covid crisis illustrates this perfectly. Suddenly Dems and Repuds can agree that a $3.5-T (or more) deficit is a good thing as long as almost all of it goes to the top 15%. I'm hearing suggestions that these deficits will have to be 'paid for someday'. And they mean with social services cuts, Soc. Sec. cuts, and tax increases that will fall on everyone but the rich.
This is why you are being screwed and it isn't mostly the Boomers. It is the rich, only the rich who are screwing you. The retired Boomers earned their retirement incomes, but like me, could not stop the rich from screwing the workers (that is 80% of the American people).
IIRC, the same thing happened in the UK when the LP sold out the workers in favor of the top 15% of earners.
Like someone said the 1st past the post system has to go.
I have suggested that you not have a full proportional system and instead compromise and have a system where all the districts have 5 or 7 MPs. There are 4 "state" like areas in the UK, right? They are England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland. The districts would not extend over these borders. I don't know how your population in UK is distributed. I would guess the N. Ireland and Wales would have 1 district and Scotland 2 or 3 and England the rest of the districts.
. . . The system works with each voter being allowed to vote for more than 1 candidate and the new vote counting machines (1 designed by the LP, 1 by the Tories, etc.) the machines would give the resulting fractional votes and add them together for each candidate in the race in the district. The proper number of candidates who got the most total of fractional votes would be the MPs from that district.
. . . The large num. of MPs per district is to let 3rd and 4th parties use a bullet vote by all their members to win with as little as 8% of the vote in that district. This large # also keeps the major parties from settling for a 2 to 1 out of 3 split. This 2-1 out of 3 split will almost always happen if the dist has just 3 MP.
. . . This system also makes gerrymandering far less useful
even with total partisan control to the district boundaries.