The U.S. Is Stealing From Millennials and Gen Z To Make Boomers Even Richer

[Muda69]

https://reason.com/2025/12/18/the-u-s-is-stealing-from-millennials-and-gen-z-to-make-boomers-even-richer/

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For years, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America's biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It's the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt, and the quiet engine behind the malaise of Millennials and Gen Z.

More than a decade ago, Reason editor at large Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great cause of America's generational inequity. We noted that senior households were wealthier than ever while young households still working to make ends meet had to prop them up further.

We also warned of the threat to a genuine social safety net. Treating every elderly person, no matter how well off, as a member of a protected class entitled to increasingly unaffordable benefits will eventually destroy a system that progressives in particular cherish.

Around that time, "Occupy Wall Street" protesters were railing against "the 1 percent." I offered the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they also consider occupying the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the most powerful lobby defending the largest intergenerational wealth grab in American history.

As such, I greatly appreciated seeing Russ Greene, managing director of the Prime Mover Institute, join the fight and coin the term "Total Boomer Luxury Communism" in an important article over at the American Mind. The name sounds like a joke, but the math is sound.

American heads of households younger than 35 now have a median net worth of about $39,000 and an average net worth of more than $183,000. Those over 75 have a median net worth of roughly $335,000 and an average net worth exceeding $1.6 million. As a group, today's seniors are the wealthiest we've ever had.

Many own their homes outright in markets younger families cannot afford to enter. Seniors enjoy higher rates of stock ownership and have benefited enormously from decades of rising asset values. Meanwhile, younger Americans face soaring housing costs, student loan debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market shaped by slower growth and higher federal indebtedness.

Some of this reflects natural wealth accumulation over time, and there is nothing wrong with that. But why does the modern welfare state magnify the disparity? As Green explains, "retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid," as Social Security can redistribute up to $60,000 a year to an individual and $117,000 to a household. "Meanwhile," Green notes, "Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food."

Younger Americans are also on the hook for about $73 trillion in unfunded obligations projected over the next 75 years, making now the time to act. Some defenders of the status quo argue that higher taxes will fix the problem, but it would again fall on younger earners to continue redistributing benefits to the same affluent seniors, worsening the generational imbalance. The problem is not a lack of revenue; it's a benefit structure that ignores modern demographics, modern wealth patterns, and basic fairness. Paying less to seniors who don't need the money is the only fair reform to this dilemma.

Every time someone points these facts out, defenders respond reflexively: "But seniors paid in. They earned it." No, not all of it. Not in any meaningful, actuarial sense.

We've known for decades that the system is wildly unbalanced. As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute points out, a typical average-wage retiree in the 2030s will receive 37 percent more in Social Security benefits than they paid in taxes. Medicare is even more lopsided: Seniors routinely receive three to five times the amount they contributed.

Some older Americans who oppose reducing benefits will respond that we need to preserve the same system for younger generations. I'm sorry, but avoiding destitution in old age does not require a 25-year-old to fund the most regressive wealth transfer scheme in the developed world—especially when certain seniors use it to enjoy 25 years of vacations.

On the legal front, things are not what people think. As the Supreme Court made clear in  Flemming vs. Nestor (1960), Congress has a legal right to amend Social Security benefits. The government can change the formula tomorrow.

Social insurance programs are compatible with a basic safety net, but what we have now is a slow-motion generational fleecing.

Politicians continue to treat seniors as an overwhelmingly fragile and impoverished group in order to oppose reforming the system. Thankfully, Americans across ideological lines are beginning to recognize the structure for what it is: one that requires punishing younger generations through taxes and debt so that their grandparents can receive far more in benefits than they ever contributed or were originally promised.

Nothing but a government sponsored Ponzi scheme.  It needs to come crashing down.  Now.

 

[Muda69]

Interest on the National Debt Will Cost $16 Trillion Over the Next 10 Years: https://reason.com/2026/02/11/americans-will-pay-16-trillion-in-interest-payments-on-the-national-debt-over-the-next-10-years/

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Increased spending on old-age entitlements and the cost of financing the national debt will push annual budget deficits from $1.9 trillion this year to over $3 trillion by 2036.

That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest 10-year budget estimate, released Wednesday morning. Over the next decade, the CBO expects the national debt to hit a record high of more than 120 percent of America's gross domestic product, exceeding the previous high of 106 percent near the end of World War II.

Much of that new borrowing will occur despite an anticipated increase in federal revenue, which the CBO expects will increase from about $5.6 trillion this year to $8.3 trillion by 2036. That increase in revenue is completely swamped by a projected rise in government spending, which will surge from about $7 trillion this year to over $11.4 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window.

Nearly all of the expected increase in spending is a result of entitlement spending and the rising cost of servicing that massive pile of debt. The federal government will spend over $1 trillion on interest payments this year, and the CBO expects those interest payments to more than double over the next 10 years.

 

Over the course of the 10-year budget window, the federal government will spend an estimated $16 trillion on interest payments—that's $16 trillion in taxes that won't buy taxpayers any new government services but will merely pay the tab run up in previous years.

The major tax bill that Republicans passed and President Donald Trump signed last year will contribute to the worsening fiscal picture. The CBO estimates that policy changes implemented by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add about $100 billion to the deficit this year and about $1.4 trillion to cumulative deficits over the next decade.

On the other hand, higher tariffs imposed by the Trump administration will increase revenue by an estimated $3 trillion over the next decade, if they remain in place.

"The CBO's projections remind us that our fiscal trajectory remains unsustainable," Dominik Lett, a fiscal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said in a statement. "This reckless borrowing has real, tangible costs for Americans, creating inflationary pressure, slowing economic growth, and making borrowing more costly."

Indeed, studies have linked higher debt to rising interest rates and persistent inflation. Higher interest rates or higher inflation could, in turn, worsen the CBO's already bleak projections. The 10-year budget outlook released Wednesday assumes that inflation will stabilize at 2 percent (it is currently 2.7 percent) and that interest rates will fall in the coming years. Fiscal hawks have been warning for years that unforeseen spikes in inflation—like the one that hit after the pandemic—or other emergencies would expose the federal government's precarious fiscal position.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for reducing deficits, said in a statement that the new CBO report contains no "bright spots of encouraging news."

"A healthy balance sheet is critical for a growing economy, national security, and the ability to respond to unforeseen emergencies," she added. "At this moment in time with challenges ranging from the aging of society to growing geo-political rivalries, it is nothing short of self-sabotage to operate with such a self-imposed disadvantage."

More of the America the Baby Boomers have created for their children and grandchildren.  They "got theirs", now their descendants have to suffer for it.   They must be so proud.