The big issue in our tax system is that we mostly sacrifice income when we're young to take care of ourselves when we're older, but we don't need as much support when we're older as we used to.
"Sociologists, epidemiologists, and economists use Age-Period-Cohort Analysis to separately identify the effect of a person’s age, the point in time, and their birth cohort on some outcome… These three factors are constantly conflated and all three are used to identify intergenerational inequality, but only the third one, cohort, is legitimate for this purpose."
"Inequality can be measured by the “Gini coefficient”, which represents the distance between a perfectly equal distribution and the actually existing distribution of income or wealth, where zero is perfect equality and one is perfect inequality. When it comes to household wealth in Australia, this hasn’t really changed over the past 20 years."
"Rory Sutherland once dysphemistically described the British tax and transfer system as gerontophilic (which means sexual attraction to the elderly). His analysis was based on the dominance of income taxes in the tax base, which are mostly paid by young people who are more likely to work, and the concessional taxation of wealth."
Source: Sweet_Theory_362