New information suggests that young people are not buying into the old-vs.-young framing of Social Security opponents. Will their parents and grandparents follow suit?
Good news! Apparently Millennials are starting to see through one of the most classic narratives of the anti-Social-Security movement: generational warfare.
One side of the tactic goes something like this: old geezers spent all their money and didn’t save for retirement, but they can still afford their South Florida condos and presents for their grandchildren off your tax dollars. Thanks to them, there won’t be any money left for your retirement, and you’ll be left eating cat food and having the heat turned off in winter. We have to reform Social Security so that it no longer rips off the young to pay for the undeserving old, and then everyone will get to eat regular food at least five times a week.
Except that that’s not true. At all.
Even if it were true, the solution usually proposed is to keep the benefits the same for the retired or nearly retired, but to cut them for younger generations. And that’s the other side of the tactic: the actual policies are designed to feed generational resentment of the old for the young. You’ll be okay, sir, we’re just going after those lazy young people who don’t have any gumption or sticktoitiveness, not having grown up during the largest economic boom in human history and all. In this narrative, and in most of the actual policy proposals, benefits are preserved for already-old people, who usually vote in large numbers, with the promise of denying benefits to young people, who have baggy pants and loud music and the internet gizmos and whatnot, and who do not tend to vote as reliably. By keeping the old resenting the young and the young resenting the old, the theory is they can screw as many people as possible out of a dignified and civilized old age.
Says one young Social Security advocate, “if it’s not there for you, it’s because someone has chosen to take it away from you.” One hopes that everyone will get that message; if young people are harder to fool than expected, perhaps the older generations will be too.
Photo—Fabricator of Useless Articles/Flickr
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Uh huh. From a UK perspective, I completely buy generational warfare. My generation is going to be lumped with a spiralling tax bill to pay for ever-increasing health spending and social care for the elderly – the exact same people who cashed in on the housing bubble and spiralling property prices, many of whom got even discounts on the value of their houses in the first place thanks to Thatcher’s right-to-buy. Meanwhile education spending is slashed and welfare for the young cut, while our government keeps healthcare spending flat while cutting everything else and actually proposes capping the amount the elderly have to pay towards their own care and a ludicrously low £25 k. Mindblowing. Talk about a government of the middle-aged, for the old.
I feel completely screwed over by the older generation and if I stay here will likely spend my life paying taxes for services that benefit them but will not be there by the time I’d old. Anyone who thinks the NHS as it stands will survive the next 50 years is delusional, and everyone knows this too.
The problem with this is, well, who is asking to stop the generational warfare.
When you have one group – boomers – that had it pretty good, with pensions and affordable college and a shot to save money (even if they never did), and that same group essentially spent their middle-age voting to take those things away from the younger generations, then it just seems like an accountability dodge. Of course the generation coming in for most of the (real) criticism is going to want a truce.
What do they have on us? The same general perceptions that every generation has about those that come after. Well, that an projection, pretending that many of us don’t have jobs because we don’t ‘want’ them, or that we live at home because we ‘refuse to grow up’ (and not because there are no jobs, and that they keep rent so high that we can’t afford to move out with our pitiful wages. The average baby boomer has no clue that the minimum wage had a real value nearly double what it is today when they were 20).
Our criticisms are real. They’re criticism are merely phantoms of their own guilt.
I don’t have any interest in seeing Social Security dismantled, though. On that, we should have a united front. That isn’t old vs. young, it’s the elite vs. everyone else.
The problem is, given how my generation views theirs, how can we trust them? How do we know that the moment they get a good deal – protect their benefits, cut ours – that they won’t give in? They pull up ladders, it’s what they do. They get theirs, and then don’t want anyone else to get what they have. They didn’t want blacks to join unions, so once they got all the value they could out of them, they turned on the unions. They didn’t want younger generations competing with them for jobs, so once they got a good education, they started gutting and privatizing student loans. When they started to retire, they voted for politicians who offshored jobs or converted them to prison slave-labor. They refuse to let housing prices come down to a point where people my age can afford to buy homes, because they don’t want to lose their bubble ‘investment’. They had freedom in their youth, but now that they’re old, they want the jackboot for us.
The inter-generational hostility goes a whole lot deeper than you seem to believe here. It isn’t about social security – it’s about their parents handing them a shining city on the hill, and them handing us a walled ghetto with prison-guard towers and men with machine guns.
I agree. Our generation is going to have permanently depressed wages – our kids are likely to have a better life than we did. Our generation was told to go get an education, because we don’t want to all be flipping burgers or waiting tables for the rest of our lives, only losers do that! And now we have our educations that aren’t worth the price we paid for, and the only jobs we can get are flipping burgers or waiting tables. An entire generation feels like a failure because only a very few of us can be able to afford to live through two or three unpaid internships.
They got theirs, and screw everybody else. That’s where the hostility lies. It never was about Social Security, it’s about a generation that was given a good life by their parents, but they didn’t do the same for their children or their grandchildren.