The narrative that if you don't support Trump's economic policy you are a dumb boomer might be one of the worst deflections to come out of the Maga spite cult and that is saying something.
First off Trump is a boomer, ok besides that Trump won the majority of baby boomers by a fucking landslide. This idea that he is sticking it to the boomers is delusional.
Second the stock market falling actually hurts Millennials and Gen Z. Milesians and Gen Z invest more in stocks compared to boomers.
Approximately 30% of Gen Z individuals begin investing during their university years or early adulthood, a significant increase compared to 15% of Millennials, 9% of Gen X, and 6% of Baby Boomers.
The reason why is because real estate as a form of investing is not viable due to boomer housing policy. Not only has Trump never shown any indication of addressing this he has done the opposite lie removing the social security tax which taxes rich boomers on social security.
In the United States, this inequality between old and young on housing is so bad that boomers with no children at home
now own twice as many large homes as millennials with kids.
If this system looks like it’s designed to transfer wealth to homeowners at the expense of non-homeowners, that’s because it is. Housing policy in most Western countries is not really about housing at all, but
about inflating real-estate prices indefinitely:
The United States subsidizes mortgage borrowing. It subsidizes property taxes. It subsidizes capital gains on your home. It subsidizes ownership over renting by taxing the income with which people pay rent but not the in-kind or “imputed” rent that homeowners get for free. It subsidizes the entire mortgage-lending enterprise with light regulation of systemic risk, periodic federal bailouts, and an implicit promise to keep providing them.
Every one of these policies encourages people to treat their housing as an investment and to sink as much money into it as they can, rather than investing their savings in their own education or businesses or in financial instruments like bank deposits, stocks, and bonds—things that make the economy more prosperous overall.
The thing about the growth of home values is it isn’t based on any great skill or productive contribution from the owners. It’s simply a wealth transfer from the rest of society based on circumstances largely outside the individual homeowners’ control. Breaking this down by age, obviously the people who have owned homes the longest have benefited most from this system, and each successive generation is having to sacrifice more to own a more costly home. This ponzi scheme then, is a great wealth-transfer from the young to the old. The Boomer with a house worth a million dollars, paid for with a couple of years wages, hasn’t worked harder or played the market more shrewdly than the millennial gathering ten years savings to get a mortgage deposit in his 30s, he was just in the market earlier.
What makes this especially egregious is this is just one among many ways in which the fruit of young people’s productivity is transferred directly to the old in historically unprecedented ways. If we were to draw up a society from scratch, we would probably say it’s better to give people a small fortune at the beginning of their life — when they can use it to start a business, buy a home, provide for a large family — than at the end of their life. And yet the Western welfare state has become a great system of wealth transfers to the old.
What has Trump done or at least plan to do about the cost of housing the main cost of living crisis ?
