RESPONSE to those that keep on pushing ‘Boomers who are on government aged pensions that are the problem … many live in $1M homes … ‘

WHY should ‘the Boomers’ pay for the largesse of the Coalition upon their ‘High Net Worth Boomer supporters’?

$1M homes … the cost of housing in Sydney.

-it took 30 + years to pay off and more if divorced!

The $1M family home does not pay for the utilities, maintenance, nor put food on the table.

-it is SHELTER; not an investment

The aged pension asset test should apply perhaps to those with ‘property portfolios’ … The High Net Worth Boomers … who may have also avoided paying their fair share of Taxes?

-who enjoy benefits of negative gearing, capital gains, franking credits and Family Trusts! FFS!

$1M home is all the majority of Boomers who have managed to hold onto ‘a home’ have … it is all they can pass on for ‘their children’ to SHARE!

DO you suggest that GENS X Y Z should also be denied the shared inheritance of the ‘Family Home’?

When Gens X Y Z have been robbed of their future …

-the lowest wages growth, insecure work, competition for jobs from visa workers willing to work at slave rates to gain a PR Visa.

-and locked out of the housing market in their own country by foreign cash buyers?

ISN’T it more about pooooor Coalition grubment policies … ?

WHY are our Youth subjected to the lowest wages growth?

WHY do they not enjoy the security of permanent positions that the Boomers had?

WHY do they have to compete with overseas workers for jobs?

WHY are they outbid at housing auctions by cashed-up foreigners?

The ‘Boomers’ – the majority of them – paid full TAXES for 40 years or more!

Many also paid into SUPER Funds!

WHY should ‘the Boomers’ pay for the largesse of the Coalition upon their ‘HNW Boomer supporters’?

‘OK Boomer’ resentment will grow over intergenerational wealth transfer

Tony Walker

Columnist and award-winning foreign correspondent

November 17, 2019

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“OK Boomer!” Let me rise on behalf of my own baby boomer generation, not in disapproval of our X, Y and Z children but in their support. The “OK Boomer!” meme, popularised in the United States on social media and amplified across the Tasman by a young New Zealand MP to ridicule an entitled cohort, has sliced through generations to expose a widening disconnect between age brackets.Play Video Play video0:19NZ MP brings ‘okay boomer’ to parliament

NZ Greens MP Chlöe Swarbrick has brought the ‘okay boomer’ meme into parliament.

NZ Greens Chloe Swarbrick deployed the phrase “OK Boomer” in Parliament to put down a conservative MP who had been heckling her on climate change.

In Australia, the “OK Boomer” meme might just as easily be applied to growing tax-advantaged wealth disparities. My own Gen Y daughter has been going on about this for years, to which my response has been to accuse her, in jest, of “generational envy”. After all, didn’t we Baby Boomers have our own generation gap in the 1960s, more pronounced than the one now, as we fought our battles with our “silent generation” parents? Didn’t we shift the country on its axis – and for the better – in the Vietnam era? And, by the way, didn’t Baby Boomers such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs create the software and hardware for the communications revolution to which Millennials are addicted?

All of this is true, but as the most privileged generation – with the caveat that many, many Baby Boomers born between 1946-1964 have fallen through the cracks – we have to admit that Millennials and their successor generation (known as Gen Z) have a point.

"Ok boomer" has become the catch-cry of a generation. But why not say "ok biillionaire" instead?

OPINION

BILLIONAIRES

‘OK boomer’? Instead of a generational war, let’s fight the rich!

A lucky generation in a lucky country in danger of scorching its dumb luck has had bestowed on itself the sort of once-in-a-hundred-year windfall that is unlikely to be repeated in all our lifetimes, Millennials included.

The housing boom is the Baby Boomer Klondike. I’m talking about a period of supercharged wealth accumulation that has produced the sort of intergenerational-riches bulge that has distorted the benefits of a record-setting economic expansion to the advantage of one generation and the disadvantage of others. You would be hard put to argue that, if not intergenerational theft, this was not an intergenerational provocation driven by the most favourable giveaway tax regime for an entitled generation in the Western world.

In other words: Generation X, born between 1965-1980; Y, 1981-1996; the so-called Millennials; and Z, 1997 onwards, have a rather large point in their criticisms of a protected Baby Boomer species.

This Boomer cohort is spearheaded by a ubiquitous self-funded retiree block in cahoots with pestilential money managers whose “benchmarks” have much less to do with the greater good than they do with the commissions they receive. This noisy cabal helped demolish Labor’s dysfunctional and overloaded election ambitions in which a so-called “retiree tax” became an easy target.

Chloe Swarbrick, 25-year-old New Zealand MP who threw out the 'OK Boomer' retort when heckled recently.

OPINION

BABY BOOMERS

Gen why we shouldn’t use generalisations about generations

Among various consequences of the Labor debacle is that overdue reforms of the tax system – such as reining in negative gearing, capping tax-free franking credit returns, and overhauling capital gains tax and family trust concessions – will be off the table for the time being.

This will continue until the government is left with no choice. Budgetary pressures will dictate a re-balancing of an unfair tax system in which younger taxpayers continue to underwrite a wealth transfer to an older generation. The question is not if but when this transfer becomes unsustainable and politically untenable. In the meantime, “OK Boomer” resentment – by whatever description – will continue to grow.

The Grattan Institute’s Danielle Wood, co-author of a timely survey “Generation Gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians“, says that for the first time in living memory we are setting up a generation to be worse off than the one before.

Numbers tell their own story. Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys of Household Income and Wealth 1994-2016 show that head of household wealth in the 55-74 bracket had more than doubled to around $1.3 million compared with Gen Ys and Zs, whose worth had flat-lined.

Homeownership among under-35-year-olds has plummeted. This is especially so among the young and poor. In 1981, 60 per cent of people in the lowest wealth quintile aged 25-34 owned a house; now, the figure is just 20 per cent. All this is taking place against the background of low wages growth, increasing casualisation of the workforce, job insecurity, the precariousness of the gig economy, and the near-certainty of lower incomes for Millennials than their predecessors.

Chloe Swarbrick, the 25-year-old New Zealand MP who threw out the 'OK Boomer' retort when heckled recently. — Chloe Swarbrick, the 25-year-old New Zealand MP who threw out the ‘OK Boomer’ retort when heckled recently.CREDIT:GREENS.ORG.NZ

On top of that is the frog-boil, as Wood puts it: an ageing demographic whose demands on a working-age population will escalate from now. This is not sustainable under the present tax system in which net transfers – government benefits minus taxes – have dramatically increased for older households but not for younger ones.

OK, Boomer; it’s time to yield some ground.

Tony Walker is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University.