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Comment by fear91 | Hacker News Reader

I believe there are some solutions to help alleviate the situation.

Introduce land value tax.

In the countries using it, stop the mandatory Ponzi scheme retirement pyramid where young people are forced to pay a sizeable part of their paycheck while having no hope of receiving any in 30-40 years - that's straight up, time-delayed stealing.

Close the tax gaps used by corporations.

Provide free healthcare so people don't get ruined by medical emergencies.

Stop the student loan madness, provide free university education.

Restrict mortgage lending - it makes the property prices baloon in the long run and encourages housing bubbles.

Most importantly, start treating renewable energy and emissions seriously because we are destroying this planet with a speed with which we probably won't have to worry about economy after a few more generations.

Unfortunately, all of those would require enormous political changes and are impossible to implement.

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> all of those would require enormous political changes and are impossible to implement

Because our generation doesn't vote [1].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-...

They also are clustered in coastal cities and votes there are worth less than votes elsewhere for reasons.

I wonder how much of turnout downturn is just rational: If half my city didn’t vote it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference for the last national election. Probably wouldn’t have mattered if the whole city didn’t vote, because I live in coastal California.

> votes there are worth less than votes elsewhere for reasons

139 million Americans voted in 2016's general election [1]. Of that, 34 million were millennials, or 49% of millennial eligible voters [2].

69% of Boomers voted [2]. If a similar fraction of millennials voted, we'd have had 48 million votes [a]. That would bring our share of the vote to 31% [b], the same as boomers [c].

Geographic effects act on the margins. Bringing 14 million additional voters to the polls will change outcomes and change legislative priorities regardless of how they are distributed.

[1] http://www.electproject.org/2016g

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-...

[a] (34 x 10^6 / 0.49) 0.69*

[b] (48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6)/(48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6 + 139 x 10^6)

[c] 48.1 x 10^6 / (48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6 + 139 x 10^6)

What you are proposing would require massive taxation in the US and the typical HN reader would be the income range expected to bear the brunt of the costs. The US already taxes corporations to a greater extent that many other G8 nations...you won't be able to fund your utopia based solely on corporate profits.

What does renewable energy have to do with the bleak finances of a generation?

I could see the online free university thing happening. I already see some good moocs out there and they only get better and better. I could see them eventually replacing traditional universities for sure.

Also the united states already has a large land value tax called property tax. It helps to fund local governments.

I'm not being flippant when I say that these types of suggestions get you labelled as a shill for Russia in the current political environment. I've seen in on multiple occasions. The propaganda against any policy that actually helps the public is insane.

The idea that social security will disappear in 30-40 years isn't supported by evidence.

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