The problem I am seeing today is that the generations are turning on each other due to the difficulties of making it in this country. However, the financial difficulties Millennials and Zoomers are experiencing has less to do with Boomers than it does with the capital class looting the country. The only thing that most workers own that is taxed as a long-term capital gain is the gain on the real estate they own and most people only own the home in which they live, if they own that.
Anyone who does not believe me only needs to examine GDP growth with respect to personal wealth growth. More and more of the growth in GDP has gone to capital at the cost of labor over the last 40 years due the one-two punch of supply-side taxation (low taxation on capital and other forms of investment income) coupled with global labor arbitrage (shopping for the cheapest place to produce goods and services in the world). That is why the stacks of billionaires keep getting higher and everyone else feels like they are falling behind. The people who are getting hammered tax-wise are upper middle class workers. When the supply-side stimulus was first introduced by the Reagan administration (cooked up by the Heritage Foundation) in the early eighties, America produced a large portion of what it consumed, so freeing up capital via preferrential taxation on capital-based income did have a "trickle down" effect to workers via the creation of domestic jobs. However, forty years of globalization has resulted in working Americans being divorced from these tax savings. No single politician is going to fix this problem, regardless of the promises he/she may make because it is not a political problem. It is a tax code problem. The only thing that is going to bring things back to Earth is either elmininating the supply-side stimulus and taxing long-term capital gains like ordinary income (what the little people earn) or at least targerting preferrential tax treatment to gains earned by investing in companies that improve the finanical outlook of domestic workers. So far, the capital class is not giving up without a fight.
Anyway, I am going to step down from my soapbox before this thread gets locked. I have met a lot of the long-term posters at Experience. I am certain that most people on this forum are smart enough to get the real reason why things are getting harder for normal people in this country. There is a certain class of low-information worker who is looking for a messiah. However, the only thing that will fix the problem is educating people about that the problems with the tax code and I will leave it at that.
