You should vote in your jurisdictions’ meaningful primaries, get involved with campaigns and causes that represent you and organise like-minded citizens.

> Either way the child is inheriting economic wealth they didn't produce

There isn't a whole lot. But you're missing the point of parenting. Hint: it's not financial support. You can't write a baby a check for $1M, plop it down in an empty house and expect it to live a good life. After you die you're not doing any of the stuff that actually makes having a parent valuable to a child relative to receiving the necessary financial support (which will not even be available to working class children under your proposed system).

Maybe if you were confident your children would be adequately taken care of if you died, you wouldn't have to work so hard saving up a nest egg and would actually have more time to be a parent.

Who determines what is fair?

And yes a company doing that is a completely different situation. Like it or not we pay into a pool that if you are a citizen you will receive benefits. You also pay into an account for your 401k that you own. Renouncing citizenship, you walked away from the former account.

Sears, Toys R' Us, Marsh .... all brought by PE firms. All drained dry by interest payments, until there is nothing left.

The vampires have already gotten all the blood out of the body before bankruptcy occurs.

It's usually part of a future worker's income. That is how they are underfunded. If the employee paid into a fund then these problems would happen less.

The problem is it's a promise to pay future money to today workers in the future, and when future money does not pan out, there is no reason one debt holder (pensioner) should have absolute precedence over another (lender, who sometimes lends enough to get the company past bad times).

For example, putting a pensioner absolutely first would make lenders stay away, and any companies that have a chance of being saved by lenders would then die, causing more pain.

Yes, there is a reason: people matter more than companies. Lenders can price that risk in. If that makes lenders "stay away"? Then the executive teams that get their golden parachutes get screwed too, and I'm frankly pretty okay with that.

And let's be real: pensions are virtually never (you might find one large example; you won't find ten) destroyed to save a business. They're destroyed to make their assets worth more in a flip. We need not be dishonest in this discussion.

And when is the last time one of these companies had their pensions cut, executives paid, then turned around the ship to be successful?

I mean, that's a great story on paper, but it's never the way this plays out. BEST CASE a PE firm buys up the company then sells off the assets at a profit to themselves. The workers NEVER come out ahead and almost universally would be better off if the company went under leaving them with whatever the partial pension funding was.

GM just did that during the recession, saving a huge number of jobs, and enabling GM to pay partial pensions. In fact, probably any company (and municipality, of which there are many) that went through or was near bankruptcy and turned around did so because of access to capital.

So you claim it never happens. I claim it happens in almost every case where some company was saved. Loans don't magically appear to help places without access to capital markets, which means in almost all cases PE.

That you don't see it, even in high profile cases like this, doesn't make it uncommon. Simply google and you'll find lots of examples counter to your claims.

If you want some academic studies, [1] shows that PE companies are better managed across developed and developing countries than non-PE, [2] shows that PE financed companies service debt at a lower cost to companies than non-PE firms (meaning that not taking PE, but using other sources, costs the company more), [3] shows that PE companies show more growth and employment than non-PE companies, and on and on. These are peer-reviewed journal articles that measure precisely what you likely have developed a feeling about from news and pop sources.

These articles are representative of a google scholar search on private equity research since 2015, and all appear on the first page. The rest of the page that addresses your claims reads similarly. Check it yourself.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20151000

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-financial...

[3] https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2015.240...

I was operating under the understanding that what you have so wisely suggested is exactly how pensions are generally structured, plus contributions from employers. Have I been misinformed?

I was also under the impression that these contributions are vulnerable to problems like assuming an incorrect long-term discount rate, life expectancy jumps, and more.