{"id":99827,"date":"2025-12-21T03:00:59","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=99827"},"modified":"2025-12-22T11:24:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T16:24:06","slug":"boomers-a-vampiric-generation-battening-on-the-blood-of-the-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/12\/21\/boomers-a-vampiric-generation-battening-on-the-blood-of-the-young\/","title":{"rendered":"Boomers – A vampiric generation battening on the blood of the young"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> points out, the hate may be more than a little over-done:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“… 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”<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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%<\/a>. 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%<\/a>. There is no increase in generosity.<\/p>\n

Or we can just look at the history. The Social Security Administration’s own website<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update, 22 December<\/strong>: Welcome, Instapundit<\/em> 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<\/em> \u2013 https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson<\/a> that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: There’s a more developed theory of Boomer-hating. The more developed theory goes: Boomers are plundering the young. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,28,53,13],"tags":[407,262,956,315],"class_list":["post-99827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-babyboomers","tag-culture","tag-millennials","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-pY7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99827"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99850,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99827\/revisions\/99850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}