Theft at the Public Till
Increasingly the costs of their medical and nursing care will fall on the American worker. Objectively, over the past twenty years there has indeed been a large net transfer of resources from youth to elderly in a number of trends: growth in entitlement programs for the elderly like Medicare and Social Security; an erosion of the education budget as the baby boomers left school; the grow- ing value of homes and property in the hands of the elderly as the boomers forced up the value of the existing housing stock. But younger people don’t seem to begrudge this improvement in the status of the elderly. There is little support in public opinion surveys for an intergenerational battle over resources. When asked if we spend too much on health care for the elderly, young people are among the most adamant who say, “Not enough!” The problem is not about the merits of improving the position of the elderly, but how to pay for it. The basic structural problem is paying for the growing entitlement programs for the elderly - Medicare and Social Security in particular -- at a time when the federal deficit is large and growing, taxes are increasing, and the savings rate languishes. Baby boomers in particular are unprepared economically for the future They have low levels of savings compared to their predecessors. They had their kids late-many of us will be paying for college education for our kids around the time we hope to retire, and around the time our very old parents will be in need of the most help financially, physically, and emotionally. If we resort to taxes as the solution to our problem, we are condemning a generation of younger taxpayers to economic servitude. They will have to work hard to pay the taxes to keep Medicare and Social Security alive, even though we have not been quite so generous with them in providing opportu- nities for jobs or developing programs for education, job training, housing, and economic development.
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