AGEISM

Let’s Blame Older People for Economic Inequality and Everything Else

What? We ran out of immigrants, people of color and uppity working women to blame?

Here are two gray-haired villains celebrating the fact that they’re destroying America by refusing to die. Photo by Isak Pettersson on Unsplash

Apparently, we’ve found a new villain: Grandma and Grandpa.

The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece by Samuel Moyn called *Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential*.

He argues that older Americans are “hoarding” wealth, housing and political power, and that addressing inequality means asking them to give more of it up.

Older Americans do hold a disproportionate share of wealth, but only because they’ve had more years to save. Do you really want to fault people for putting aside money when there’s not much of a safety net in this country to catch us if we don’t?

The framing is all wrong.

It mistakes who holds assets for who holds power.

This Is About Power, Not Age

Yes, Congress skews old.

But the problem isn’t age.

Mike Johnson is in his 50s and relatively new to Congress. Katie Britt is in her 40s. Neither represents some ancient ruling class and neither is exactly fixing the system.

Wealth Isn’t the Same as Control

It’s true that older Americans, on average, have more wealth than younger people.

But what does that “wealth” actually look like? It looks a lot like a house somebody spent decades paying off.

The median net worth of a 75-year-old is $335,600. Neat coincidence: The average home value in the United States is $366,019. The median price for an existing home is $398,400. If most of an older person’s wealth is just their home’s value, how much actual cash do you think they have? Chances are decent they’re still sweating the price of gas and groceries.

Don’t mix up “aging in place” with “hoarded power.”

I turned 60 this year. I’m not remotely wealthy and my house is not worth anything close to those figures, but it is paid off. It is larger than my husband and I need, now that our nest is empty, but we’d struggle to find another place that is any cheaper. It would likely cost us money to move into a smaller house. Sorry not sorry, we have no plans to move at this time.

We Keep Blaming the Wrong People

We will do anything to avoid admitting that extreme capitalism isn’t serving us well. We keep casting around for someone to blame.

It’s those single mothers cranking out kids! Except wait a minute, we want a higher birth rate now, so never mind, crank away. Some conservatives, who used to blame teen pregnancy for all kinds of societal problems, are now nostalgic for the days when we had more 15-year-old moms.

It’s those pesky immigrants! But as it turns out, immigrants are a net benefit to the country.

We rode racism as long as we could but the number of people of color is now almost half the population and we are getting more diverse all the time so that storyline isn’t working as well now.

We also tried to blame stay-at-home mothers for just sitting around and spending their husband’s money before we switched to blaming career-oriented women for not having enough children and for taking what ought to be a male provider’s job.

But the real problem is what it has always been — our system.

The problem is not that some gray-haired people live in a home of average value that they may have bought 30 years ago for what now sounds like a song but over which they sweated the payments when they were young.

The Real Drivers of Inequality Haven’t Changed

Economic inequality didn’t emerge because people got older.

It emerged because of policy choices. We destroyed unions. We undertax investments and overtax wages. We have given extraordinary power to the oligarch billionaires, who can be of any age. Peter Thiel is 58. Sam Altman is 40.

The billionaires must find it endlessly amusing that we’re all blaming each other for the mess we’re in based on our gender, color, age and everything else, while they sit back and loot us.

What if we just … joined together? What if we stopped squabbling amongst ourselves and started holding the powerful accountable?

The people with gray hair are not your enemy, young people. The elite billionaires running the world are.

The Pattern Behind the Blame

The problem is the disproportionate wealth and power of the elites. It isn’t your grandparents.

But as long as we keep blaming the wrong people, nothing changes.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe! I also have a Substack about economic inequality called *Untrickled and another aimed at authors who want to self-publish books called[ The Indie Author](https://selfpublishingbookauthors.substack.com/). My new book is[ Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJNRCQSJ). And yes, those are my husband’s actual boots on the cover! My most recent novel is[ The Trailer Park Rules](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTHT43L9).* Tips joyfully accepted via Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/michelleteheux

**All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way. ** — Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

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