How about a deal: They stop taxing us first?

The amount of wealth being sucked from the labour of younger generations is beyond any ridicule. Extremely high taxes on labour - that goes to the old, extremely high real estate prices - to the old, extremely high rents - to the old. Yet it is not enough and they take on huge debts to the government - to be paid by the young. Top that with the forced pension fund contributions of young workers who are to expect to never receive any pension when they turn old.

I know this is a high earner tech forum, and these things don't become most readers, but for people working in other sectors the perspective is different.

Every culture, going back thousands of years has young people taking care of old people. We've just made the system so efficient that you don't have to talk to the old people and wipe their poo.

I'm not against taking care of older people, and you have to make an effort to interpret my post like that.

Every culture has also had older people stepping down at some point to let fresh blood take the charge and carry the burden. In Western societies we don't see that so much anymore. Instead it seems the old prefer to see things rot than to let younger people take over. With land, farms, houses, businesses, etc.

If younger people got an honest chance all would benefit, including the old. Instead young people are mostly seen as people to exploit or ignore.

It is not difficult to look up history. The current old people who hold power in small and in large, when you look up their history, they all got help to start their ventures. Very few of them are self made, so why the act?

Sounds like you are discussing the demographic pyramid. 100 years ago, life expectancy was roughly 40 years. Death cleared out the old.

I think that is a misunderstanding of life expectancy. Death didn't clear out the old 100 years ago, it was infant and child mortality that pulled the average down.

Young people took care of old people because there was a larger social contract in place: old people's responsibility was to build an environment in which their successors could thrive, so that later everyone could share in that thriving.

>We've just made the system so efficient

It's only efficient at robbing the young.

One half of this social contract, the young-giving-to-old, was formalized (and forced) while the other half, old-building-for-young, was utterly abandoned. There's a great meme about this: "no take, only throw!"[0]

Eating all the seed corn[1] will eventually lead to famine.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-take-only-throw

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eat_one%27s_seed_corn#English

> Pensioners comprise the biggest creditor in the world. Are you sure you want to tax people who've worked all their lives, saving up money, who are now living off the interest payments?

Yeah, and I say that as someone on the wrong side of forty.

The relative growth in wealth from pensioners to working groups in most Western nations is completely unsustainable, and will end very badly eventually. Trying to flatten the curve now is preferable to the alternatives.