As a member of the recently identified “Generation Jones”, I could take part in the widespread boomer hate with a clear conscience … but as Scott Alexander points out, the hate may be more than a little over-done:
“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”
There’s a more developed theory of Boomer-hating. The more developed theory goes: Boomers are plundering the young. We know this, because their share of resources is high and keeps increasing. They use their large population share and good voter turnout to vote themselves ever-higher pensions at the expense of working taxpayers.
How might we investigate this theory? We can’t use total social security spending, because the number of elderly has gone up. Can we use social security spending per elderly person? No; the amount of social security paid out depends on the amount paid in. If each year’s retirees earned more during their career than the previous year’s did (this is true), then each year’s will get a higher SSI payment, even if the system’s “generosity” stays the same.
We might start by looking at change in social security payment divided by change in median income. Over the past fifty years, average Social Security payment in inflation-adjusted dollars increased 60%. If we expect these payments to reflect earnings twenty years before disbursement, we can look at real median personal income from 1953 to 2003; this also increased 60%. There is no increase in generosity.
Or we can just look at the history. The Social Security Administration’s own website says that its generosity peaked in 1972, when the program primarily served the Greatest Generation; since then, it’s been one contraction after another. In 1983, the government increased the full retirement age from 65 to 67; in 1993, they made Social Security more taxable. Since then, most of the changes have been cost-of-living increases, which are indexed to inflation and not the result of active lobbying on old people’s behalf.
Why do so many believe that old people have discovered a vote-themselves-infinite-benefits hack? Since old people represent an increasing fraction of the population, are living longer, and face a secular trend of rising healthcare costs, even when their benefits per capita per year are stable or declining the government will spend more money on them as a group. This spending is indeed rapidly becoming unsustainable, the elderly will need to accept big benefit cuts to make it sustainable again, and they are resisting those cuts.
So have we finally discovered the fabled Boomer selfishness? Call it what you want. But remember that the Boomers did pay money into Social Security to support their own parents, believing that they would be supported in turn. Learning that yours is the generation where the pyramid collapses is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe they should suck it up and take the sacrifice. You’d do this, right? Voluntarily give up money which is yours by right, in order to help other generations? Oh, sorry, you didn’t hear the question, you were too busy writing your 500th “You don’t hate Boomers enough, why won’t they hurry up and die, we need to declare intergenerational warfare and seize our rightful inheritance” post.
Update, 22 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] I REFUSE TO IDENTIFY AS “GENERATION JONES” SINCE THE BOOMERS GAVE US THAT NAME: Boomers – A vampiric generation battening on the blood of the young. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » I REFUSE TO IDENTIFY AS “GENERATION JONES” SINCE THE BOOMERS GAVE US THAT NAME: Boomers – A vam — December 22, 2025 @ 01:30
FDR implemented SS as a poverty program disguised as a pension. Medicare was tacked on later. If you look at how SS is paid out there is a massive shift from the high income to the low income. These numbers are old but 90% of roughly $15k plus 32% of the next $78k + 15% of the last $90k. So a max earner of roughly $18kwould get $13.5k + $26k + 13.5kor 52kper year. People earning $93k get around $40k and minimum wage earners essentially get $13.5 k.
Everyone is taxed a flat rate of 6.2 and the employer pays 6.2. In practice though that means $93k guy pays $5500 but he costs the company $98.5k. In other words the employer is out $98.5and you only see$86.5.
Looking at the Trump Accounts by putting 1K in and letting relatives boost that up to$5kit should double every 7 years is an attempt to neutralize SS. It would be2.4milat 63. Even inflation adjusted it should be worth $1milroughly.
Comment by Steve — December 22, 2025 @ 02:39
“share of resources”?
Oh, Nicholas sees the resources but ignores that Boomers worked all their lives to pile up said resources, resources that many in which the successor generations of Boomers now benefit from. Hmm, how unperceptive! Or did Nicholas implicitly assume that Boomers were born into the positions Nicholas sees them in today? And Nicholas has fallen hard for the Apex Fallacy, the belief that all Boomers enjoy the lifestyle of the 10% of Boomers who are the most well off. Or maybe the 1% or even 0.01%. Nicholas ignores Boomers who are impoverished or didn’t even live long enough to be among us today.
Nicholas also failed to note that only one age cohort ever voted in politicians (e.g., Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole) who explicitly and publicly raised Social Security (SS) taxes and cut benefits, the latter by raising the so-called full SS retirement age and making benefits “more taxable”. That age cohort is–wait for it–the much maligned Boomers. Perhaps in his zeal to other the Boomers and pretend he’s not one of us Nicholas has lost sight of that. If as Nicholas alleges “old people have discovered a vote-themselves-infinite-benefits hack” then we Boomers haven’t been exploiting it.
Nicholas, appearing to be part of the Born Yesterday or Year Zero age cohort (a figurative group), fails to mention the GenXers who started the Lead or Leave movement of the early 1990s. It purported to be an attempt to deal with the USA’s federal budget deficit and a future depletion of the so-called SS trust fund. But GenXers didn’t step up to the plate. Neither did the Generation Jones denialists of their Boomer identity. Their generations missed their opportunity to reform the system or at least bend the curve even a little bit. GenX elected and re-elected Clinton/Gore and all they got for their pains was an empty lockbox.
Nor does Nicholas mention the proposal floated by President George W. Bush in 2005 to move at least a part of SS to individual private accounts. President Bush dared to touch the so-called third rail of US politics. This could have been the Millennials’ moment and a chance for GenXers to redeem themselves for their earlier “whatever” non-response to comprehensive federal spending reform. Instead, the political party to which a majority of Millennials and GenXers gave their allegiance shouted down President Bush. He remained silent on the subject for the remainder of his presidency.
There was another opening during the 2012 presidential election year when candidate Mitt Romney’s remark about 47% of voters being unreachable by America’s then-least fiscally irresponsible incumbent political party because those voters were on one form of public benefit or another became news. But nasty denunciations from the party whose give-away spirit most resembles a fictional Christmas season character in a red suit broke Mitt Romney’s presidential chances. I won’t ask if Nicholas voted for Romney or the status quo. Romney was the last incumbent party candidate on a November presidential ballot who was at all serious about steering America’s federal government away from fiscal catastrophe rather than moving toward it at full speed ahead. Romney may be the last such candidate ever in my lifetime. If today’s Trump voter seems to have an if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em attitude toward the fiscal irresponsibility most associated with Democrats then look to Romney’s 2012 defeat for your explanation.
I’ve heard that the Millennials (a.k.a. Echo Boomers) may be a plurality of eligible US voters come the 2028 election, the first post-Trump election. Eligible, but almost certainly not a plurality of actual voters. The ballot box, like the future, belongs to those who show up. In every age of America’s history, the elderly are the voters most likely to show up to cast a ballot and the youngest voters are the least likely. That’s not a conspiracy, it’s the wisdom of age and the folly of youth with respect to civic duty.
We can expect that the first great impact of Millennials and Zoomers at the presidential polls will occur in the 2036 election. Ironically, that’s when the end of the now anticipated deficit of the so-called SS Trust Fund will be on the horizon. Boomers will, barring some fabulous advance in medical science, be exiting the SS rolls in ever larger numbers. For a decade and a half each year will see fewer new SS applicants than the year before. Millennials and Zoomers will have another opportunity to reform the US federal government’s taxing and spending, including that for SS. I expect that despite their present-day resentment of the system, when Millennials and Zoomers see themselves as soon to be net beneficiaries they’ll drop the ball.
Comment by Micha Elyi — December 22, 2025 @ 05:19
Well, I think that wins the award for “Longest comment of the month” easily. I think you’d be more accurate to sub out most of the references to “Nicholas” with “Scott”, as I only wrote a sentence to introduce the bulk of the post by Scott. My headline was intended to be ironic, in that I don’t think the Boomers are vampires (well, most of them anyway), but that has been the topic de jour for a heck of a lot of jours. I collected my first pension payment late last month, after ten years of fruitless unemployment, so I’m well aware that not all “Boomers/Jonesers” enjoy the kind of comfortable lifestyle that the imaginary “typical” Boomers are supposed to.
Comment by Nicholas — December 22, 2025 @ 10:24
Scott Alexander, lol. This is more of his usual behavior: his gimmick is being the polite, mild, curious, modestly rational figure who’ll investigate anything…except the 800lb gorilla sitting on in the middle of the room clashing cymbals. He did it with biology, culture, gender, race, politics, AI, and other popular contentious issues for a decade. The numbers are carefully chosen to titillate his readers’ sensibilities, give them the intoxication of feeling like rational investigators, and never ever lead to anything a center-left establishment perspective would be offended by.
If you read it and you’re familiar with the topic, you’ll see, and indeed this one is the same.
But then, you’ve a boomer. You don’t want to know.
Comment by Darren — December 22, 2025 @ 07:19
Boomers are getting pennies on the dollar for the amount of money they put into social security. Any “generation jones” member who complains needs to quit voting for democrats.
Comment by David Longfellow — December 22, 2025 @ 07:57