Robert Samuelson writes today in the Washington Post about the unsustainable expansion of government programs on top of an aging American population:
Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. By 2022, Social Security, Medicare and the non-child share of Medicaid will exceed half the budget, up from 30 percent in 1990, projects an Urban Institute study. To make room for the elderly, defense and many domestic programs are being relentlessly squeezed.
There’s no generational justice, argues Taylor: “The young today are paying taxes to support a level of benefits for the old that they themselves have no prospect of receiving when they become old.”
America’s future rests heavily on how these mega-trends play out. Democracy works best when the political system can mediate between the often-inconsistent demands of public opinion and larger national needs. This, America’s leaders can’t or won’t do. Faced with immutable trends, they have not adapted to change. Instead, they pander to partisans with soothing, though outdated, stereotypes. Nostalgia poses as policy when it is actually a marketing strategy.
Liberals won’t come to terms with aging. Believing that spending on the elderly and near-elderly constitutes the essence of progressivism — and ignoring the affluence of many elderly — some liberals even support raising these benefits. The paradoxical result is that the pro-government party has become an instrument of anti-government policies, because accommodating all the elderly’s benefits means quietly condoning deep cuts in most other programs…
So long as liberals are willing to defer the costs of funding government welfare programs via debt leveraged upon future generations, it is possible to delay the economic pain a little while longer.
But Samuelson’s insight that “the pro-government party [the Democrats] has become an instrument of anti-government policies” is a good one. The expansion of these programs on top of an aging trend for the U.S. population does represent a kind of betrayal of the very same youthful voters that Democrats often count on at the polls. It’s a betrayal because Democrats know that with the U.S. birth rate steadily falling, it’s only a matter of time until these long-promised benefits have to be cut–severely.
By that time, the youth of today will have paid into the system for many decades, only to find that the system isn’t there for them any longer.
Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.
Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden
(Image: 401k2012)
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