Wait, you've got it backwards. At the risk of stating the obvious: the wealthy older generation are the ones who want the tax cuts for the wealthy. In a progressive taxation scheme the young and poor get more benefits from the government than they pay in via taxes, so what you're arguing for would hurt you and help them.
The real problem is that assets are taxed (sometimes significantly) less than income. We're in a world where assets are becoming much more valuable than labour, but have a taxation and pension scheme that is built for the opposite (post-WWII).
The older generation has assets like houses and stocks. Youth have the ability to work. Here in Canada, the capital gains tax is literally half of what the income tax is. So when old people make their money (house prices go up, investment portfolios increase) while literally not lifting a finger, they get to shift half of their tax burden onto the people that get up every morning and work for a living. /That's/ unfair.
This is all happening in a time when we've got so much cash floating around that interest rates might go negative, which means the usual "oh, but if we tax assets then it will reduce the available investment pool and it will hurt the economy" is complete self-serving horseshit.
Taxes are one of your biggest tools for redressing the screwing over that the younger generation has got. You'd be crazy to consider them the problem. Furthermore, with pensions the older generation basically wrote themselves a blank cheque that the younger generation had to pay. I don't think we should feel obligated to follow it to the letter - and that doesn't have anything to do with tax rates, that's just a contract re-negotiation.
The situation you're referring to, where older citizens own more assets than average, might indeed seem obvious in Canada but it might not be the case at all in any country with a differently structured social security system, since the decision to save money for a rainy day or not is directly affected by the availability of social security.
In a country with an ageing population and with a pension system overwhelmingly funded by intergenerational transfer, then voting for tax cuts is optimal for young voters. In a country where pensions are mostly funded by private savings, then sure, taxes are nice.
The real problem is that assets are taxed (sometimes significantly) less than income. We're in a world where assets are becoming much more valuable than labour, but have a taxation and pension scheme that is built for the opposite (post-WWII).
The older generation has assets like houses and stocks. Youth have the ability to work. Here in Canada, the capital gains tax is literally half of what the income tax is. So when old people make their money (house prices go up, investment portfolios increase) while literally not lifting a finger, they get to shift half of their tax burden onto the people that get up every morning and work for a living. /That's/ unfair.
This is all happening in a time when we've got so much cash floating around that interest rates might go negative, which means the usual "oh, but if we tax assets then it will reduce the available investment pool and it will hurt the economy" is complete self-serving horseshit.
Taxes are one of your biggest tools for redressing the screwing over that the younger generation has got. You'd be crazy to consider them the problem. Furthermore, with pensions the older generation basically wrote themselves a blank cheque that the younger generation had to pay. I don't think we should feel obligated to follow it to the letter - and that doesn't have anything to do with tax rates, that's just a contract re-negotiation.