Retirees live off deferred compensation from their own labor in the form of savings, pensions, social security, etc. Capitalists live off returns generated by other people’s labor. The distinction isn’t whether you work, it’s where the income comes from.
And if retirees were actually ‘rich’ by your logic, elderly poverty wouldn’t be rising as benefits get gutted. People are committing petty crime in their 70s to survive. Poverty and crime are intrinsically linked, even against the belief that as age increases, the level of crime committed will decrease. That’s not a rich class, that’s a working class that got squeezed their whole lives and arrived at retirement without enough buffer.
The actual capitalist class never has that problem because their wealth compounds regardless of policy. Conflating ‘not working’ with ‘owning capital’ is exactly the meritocracy myth my previous comment was describing. It obscures who actually extracts value from whom.
This video was very informative on the retirement situation in America imo. When in reality, most of that “retirement money” is for people that would never need it given their vast wealth.
Retirees live off deferred compensation from their own labor in the form of savings, pensions, social security, etc. Capitalists live off returns generated by other people’s labor. The distinction isn’t whether you work, it’s where the income comes from.
And if retirees were actually ‘rich’ by your logic, elderly poverty wouldn’t be rising as benefits get gutted. People are committing petty crime in their 70s to survive. Poverty and crime are intrinsically linked, even against the belief that as age increases, the level of crime committed will decrease. That’s not a rich class, that’s a working class that got squeezed their whole lives and arrived at retirement without enough buffer.
The actual capitalist class never has that problem because their wealth compounds regardless of policy. Conflating ‘not working’ with ‘owning capital’ is exactly the meritocracy myth my previous comment was describing. It obscures who actually extracts value from whom.
This video was very informative on the retirement situation in America imo. When in reality, most of that “retirement money” is for people that would never need it given their vast wealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRLxcx79OvE