Tea Partiers and OWSers
Since the eruption of the Occupy Wall Street protests in mid-September, many have tried to limn the similarities and contrasts between OWS and the Tea Party movement, which first appeared on the American political scene in 2009. Some, like President Obama, strain to draw a parallel between the two. Speaking about OWS, Obama said, “I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests. In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party.”
For their part, Tea Party “conservatives” are having none of it. They are rigorously focused on the contrasts. Jim Boyd, a columnist for something called the Dallas Conservative Examiner, has written that OWSers are an “assemblage of intellectually deplete vagrants.” Not to be outdone, the pontiff of Tea Party politics, Rush Limbaugh, referred to OWS as a “parade of human debris.” Nice.
But there is one contrast between the two movements that we can all agree on. The Tea Party is dominated by older people, while OWS is clearly sustained by the young. Polls and surveys of participants at Tea Party rallies have confirmed that they tend to be older than the general population, averaging more than 45 years old. I’m not aware of similar surveys of OWS protesters, but the evidence of the eyes is that they are generally younger, many in their 20′s. Certainly, those were my impressions at both a Tea Party rally in 2009, and attending my local “Occupy” protest one day last week.
Perhaps the key to understanding both of these movements, and their apparently oppositional relationship to one another, can be found in some news that broke today regarding the relative net worth of young and old in the United States. The respected Pew Research Center announced that the wealth gap between older and younger Americans is now as wide as it’s ever been. According to the report, the average net worth of households headed by a person 65 years old or older was $170,000, while the average net worth of households headed by a person 35 years old or younger was $3,662. That’s a gap of 47:1. Why is that a big deal? Because in 1984, the gap was 10:1. The background statistics are even more troubling. A household headed by an older person is 42% better off than its counterpart in 1984, but the younger household is 62% worst off than its 1984 counterpart.
The report notes that while it isn’t at all surprising to find households headed by older people in a better position financially, the gap today is unprecedented and speaks to larger, disturbing patterns in American income inequality. “These age-based gaps widened significantly during the sour economy of recent years,” the report notes, “but all key trends are several decades old, indicating that they are also linked to long-term demographic, social and economic changes that have affected different age groups in different ways. These changes include structural changes in the labor and housing markets; delayed marriage; delayed retirement; and the changing racial and ethnic composition of the population.”
Given this as a background, is it really any surprise that Tea Partiers and OWSers seem to live in two different countries. Tea Partiers live in an America where they have already have theirs. They may admit that the game is rigged, but they got in early enough to make a future for themselves, one they now inhabit. For them, the problem is government taxes and the threat those taxes represent to their existing net worth.
OWSers, on the other hand, live in an America where there is little prospect that they will do as well as their parents and grandparents. They know the game is rigged, but they got in far too late to do anything about it. The problem for them is the economic system that robbed them of hope.
“The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner.” -Benedict XVI, Caritas et Veritate
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Can we make “parade of human debris” our blog tagline?
It’s got a kind of Emma Lazarus ring to it: “Give me your tired, your poor, your parade of human debris. The wretched refuse of your teeming shores …”
The irony is that the American welfare state consists largely of redistribution from the young to the old. In fact, MM has written repeatedly on this blog about the virtues of doing just that.
Please be serious.
How is his point not serious? Our largest redistribution program at this time is a highly regressive pair of taxes which are used to provide cash payments and medical benefits to the elderly. This is done by taxing those who are of working age.
If the post is correct that one of the biggest inequality gaps in the US is between the old and the young, then clearly Medicare and Social Security are a problem. (And we conservatives and libertarians have a solution called means testing!)
Personally, I’d be curious to see how much of the apparent growing gap is simply a result of student debt (decreasing the net worth of the young) and the appreciation of the housing market (still much higher in constant dollars than in the early 80s) which would disproportionally benefit those who are closer to owning their homes outright: the elderly. If this is the case, the young will bridge this gap simply by getting old.
BTW, there has been at least some semi scientific study of the OWS protesters done by Forham:
http://www.fordham.edu/images/academics/graduate_schools/gsas/elections_and_campaign_/occupy%20wall%20street%20survey%20results%20102611.pdf
It put the mean age of protesters at 33. (Find significance in that as you will…)
I am being serious. If you’d like I can provide citations to MM doing just that.
The dramatic change in the wealth gap (though not the mere existance of a wealth gap between those groups) seems to be something for further study.
But BA’s claim that “The irony is that the American welfare state consists largely of redistribution from the young to the old” is based on his cherry-picking social programs. 5-18 year olds get a lot of social spending for public schools.
The comment wasn’t serious because it was more of a gratuitous shot at MM than a genuine attempt to wrestle with the implications of the statistics in the Pew report. The period 1984 to 2009 wasn’t exactly noted for the explosive growth in the “American welfare state.” If anything, the social safety net – for young, poor and old – has shrunken during that time, when tax cuts and deregulation were the priority of administrations from both parties.
The statistics here point to a larger “redistribution” of wealth from the middle class to the already wealthy (or at least comfortable). Other nations with far more extensive social welfare infrastructures don’t come anywhere near the level of income and asset inequality that we have achieved in the United States. Blackadder’s comment isn’t serious because it’s yet another attempt to shoehorn an embarrassing failure of the American economic system into the shopworn tropes of neoliberal ideology.
If you want to be serious, let’s talk about the financialization of the American economy as a result of deregulation of the banking and financial services industry. Let’s talk about the export of millions of manufacturing jobs as a result of the ideologies of free trade and globalization. Let’s talk about a corporate culture in which companies scour median-wage and full-time workers from their rolls in order to maximize quarterly results rather than providing young families with an opportunity to make a decent living.
Finally, it is revealing that not one “conservative” I know has ever insisted that his or her parents and grandparents get off the government tit once they had exhausted their contributions to Social Security and Medicare. Challenge them to do so and all of a sudden those programs become “insurance,” and “earned benefits,” not “redistribution of wealth.” Adorers of the Precious Market rarely take the medicine they prescribe for others.
The period 1984 to 2009 wasn’t exactly noted for the explosive growth in the “American welfare state.” If anything, the social safety net – for young, poor and old – has shrunken during that time, when tax cuts and deregulation were the priority of administrations from both parties.
No, but the structure of Social Security and Medicare is such that it naturally expanded throughout the 1984 to 2009 period. Plus, the rates that workers have been taxed at since 1990 are significantly higher than were the case in the past, with the result that someone whose working career was 1950 to 1995 is moderately likely to get more out of the system than he or she ever paid into it.
The big problem, though, is that the Boomers and those after have not had nearly as many children as the makers of our old age benefits assumed would be the case, while lifespans and medical costs have gone up a great deal.
The statistics here point to a larger “redistribution” of wealth from the middle class to the already wealthy (or at least comfortable).
No, they don’t actually point to that. They might, perhaps, be compatible with that interpretation, but they certainly don’t point to it in any clear way.
You now run through a few rather standard claims with little suggestion as to how exactly they have benefitted the old over the young. I’ll tackle just one of them for now:
Let’s talk about the export of millions of manufacturing jobs as a result of the ideologies of free trade and globalization.
We can talk about this, but how about it we also talk about how total US manufacturing production is higher now than it was in the ’50s, despite the fact that there are so many fewer US manufacturing workers. Sure, one could imagine that “American first” type tarrifs could theoretically have kept a few more manufacturing jobs here than has been the case — though whether this would actually gain anyone real improvement when it would result in everything being more expensive is unclear — but the fact is that technology and productivity are (as happened with the agricultural sector in the first half of this century) relegating manufacturing permanently to a small portion of the US workforce. Unless we think that standing on an assembly line all day is the highest fulfillment of the human person, I think we can consider this a good thing.
Finally, it is revealing that not one “conservative” I know has ever insisted that his or her parents and grandparents get off the government tit once they had exhausted their contributions to Social Security and Medicare. Challenge them to do so and all of a sudden those programs become “insurance,” and “earned benefits,” not “redistribution of wealth.” Adorers of the Precious Market rarely take the medicine they prescribe for others.
Well, you can meet one now. My father and I (both quite conservative) spent a good deal of time and energy persuading his mother that it was unethical to give away her financial assets to family with the express aim of getting additional state medical benefits (design for elderly with few means) to cover her and my grandfather’s medical care. It was uphill work, as she was pretty well convinced still of the old New Deal story and believed that she deserved it, but I’m glad to say that we were successful.
Also, I’d note that the two policy proposals that I’d most support to “fix” Social Security and MeciCare (removing the annual maximum on payroll taxes and means testing benefits) would probably impact me personally.
Seriously: Why, in your view, should Warren Buffet be eligable to receive Social Security and Medicare? Would it not be to the common good if the money that would be spent on him were spent on those who need it more instead?
Well, here’s where the old saying “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics” is apropos. Manufacturing was 27% of GDP in 1950. In 2009, it was 11%. Manufacturing as a percentage of per capita GDP has also fallen precipitously, and we now lag behind Germany and Japan. Then there’s the balance of trade, where our import of manufactured items has been steadily climbing for nearly 40 years: http://breakthroughjournal.org/content/authors/vaclav-smil/the-manufacturing-of-decline.shtml
On Social Security and Medicare, I am entirely comfortable with means testing both programs, and setting a reasonable threshold for eligibility and even a sliding scale for benefits payouts.
At the same time, Japan and Germany also both employ fewer people in manufacturing than they did 40 years ago.
Not to mention that Japan’s economy has been badly in the toilet for the last ten years and Germany’s is partly dependant on the way that it has turned the rest of the Eurozone into an unhealthy satelite economy over the last decade.
It’s arguable that US manufacturing is a bit lower than it should be, given trade imbalances (though another line of argument would simply be that the imbalance is mostly a result of the US debt binge — private and public) but the idea that we’ll somehow return to a 50′s style economy in regards to manufacturing (or that that would be a good thing) is the product of economic ignorance.
@Mark Even Santorum agrees with you about manufacturing being down in the United States. It is partially due to regulations, penalizing of income (repatriation?), and globalization. In the case of Social Security I don’t think its right that the wealthy only contribute up until a certain point in their earnings. I think it is only right that they contribute to Social Security in a more just fashion. The wealthy should at least contribute some percentage of their income after where the cut off point is today. There is also the matter of China manipulating their currency, which I think is hurting our economy to a degree.
You’ve got it all wrong, Mark The explanation can be found in the deficient character of today’s young people, or so I keep hearing.
I also worry about the wealth gap between the rich Northeast, Great Lakes, and West Coast, and the poorer South and Great Plains (and, in fact, most rural areas of the US). I speculate that this is a factor in Rush Limbaugh’s popularity in those places.
It’s too bad they are so poorly spoken. These ows people are victims of many things, one is wall street. Another seldom pointed out is the poor way government has handled money. Some blame it on the wars. Yes wars are expensive. but it is the private contractors and their influence on congress that have driven it much higher than necessary. Entitlements, the new word of the season. Let’s explain the difference between entitlements and earned benefits. The local and federal governments have given great benefits to government employees. Pensions, for example they cannot afford to pay. Graft, corruption, money wasted on dreams for changing the world, ie green energy projects to manufacture things which have not been developed to a practical extent. If I buy an electric car it will cost me much more than any other high mileage car. Yet the gov’t gives me tax credit to do it. Question, if we all buy electric cars how will we generate enough power to charge them? Wind, solar?
The ows demonstrators remind me of why I was disillusioned 40 years ago by the anti-war movement. Somehow people get emotional and take their goals to ridiculous extremes throwing the baby out with the bath water. Their leadership doesn’t want to be strict, but such things turn into chaos. Look up weathermen and days of rage, with our President’s old friend Bil Ayres. Many times the most radical are those who have family with money. They really risk little. Whatever purpose they thought they would serve has been. Go home stop getting free meals on other peoples property and disturbing the peace. Omodons.
Excuse me, by earned benefit, I meant to add, Social Security, I paid for it for well over 35 years. That’s not an entitlement. Giving similar benefits to illegal aliens and people who have never worked, That’s is only justifiable if the legal resident or citizen is disabled. If they are not here legally or have never worked enough to earn benefits. Oh, well. You cannot leave American children starve. You can expect Americans on public aid to be willing to do things illegal criminals gladly do. Heck we could create a lot of jobs just by enforcing the immigration laws on the books. Just think of all the old school buses and boloney sandwiches used to get the criminals back across the border. Jobs there. I found through life that just because I went to college, (and paid back my loan) that did not guaranty me the job I wanted, More often than not I did the job I could get. I raised children bought houses, sometimes working 55-60 hours a week for years. Stop crying, stop being victims. Do what needs to be done. If you picked a school that was too expensive, bad choices come in life. Go home and look for solutions without expecting others to give them to you.
Pickett, I think your argument is with your conservative brethren like Darwin, who consider Social Security and Medicare to be socialism, which of course they are!
Giving similar benefits to illegal aliens and people who have never worked, That’s is only justifiable if the legal resident or citizen is disabled.
People who have never worked, or work in industries not covered by Social Security, or not worked enough quarters to qualify, do not receive Sociali Security benefits under current law.
@Darwin–
Do you not realize that the elderly now receiving those benefits themselves paid into them during the entire course of their working lives? It’s not like the young are suddenly being asked to give the elderly a hand-out; it’s that the elderly are now collecting on an investment.
And how do you expect the young to bridge that gap, which you accurately point out is primarily the result of home ownership in most cases, if: a) they can’t afford to buy a home; and: b) the day of inflated valuation of real estate is over, probably permanently?
See my comment above on the point that many of the elderly will receive back significantly more than they put into these programs. By the governments own accounting in the coming years the “fund” will run dry and benefits will be coming directly from the payments of those who are currently working.
On bridging the gap: Keep in mind that property values in most areas (economic disaster zones like Detroit aside) have fallen back only around ten years. They are still significantly above where they were further in the past, and homes are likely to continue to retain some substantial level of value even if they never become the ridiculously good investments they briefly appeared to be. If a middle class family buys a house worth $100-200k and pays it off over the course of 30 years, they will have an asset of some substantial value by the time they retire regardless of the fluctuations of the housing market.
Also, people are increasingly (and wisely) putting away money in 401ks and other private retirement savings. Obviously, such savings are going to be of more value at 65 than they were at 35, since people will have been saving for an additional 30 years and those savings will have appreciated in value.
Honestly, given the way the modern economy works, I’m not necessarily seeing the net worth figures as all that worrying. Getting from 3k in net worth to 170k in net worth over 30 years is not all that difficult a thing.
What’s far more worrying is the levels of unemployment among the young — particularly the young and not very well educated as even jobs that pretty clearly don’t require much education increasingly make it a prerequisite for consideration.
By the way, in reference to the quote to young lady is holding on a sign from Goethe: Of course the Sage of Weimar’s views were very ample, but at the very least we can assume partly that most of what was meant by Catholicism in his day would have been included by what he meant by “enslaved”.
Yes, Goethe hated the Catholic Church, as do all Prometheans. He would have loved Ayn Rand, though.
Mark,
I think to call the author Werther a Promethean is kind a giant literary or aesthetic category mistake. You must have him confused with Nietzsche. They both spoke German.
Similarly, nothing in his work jibes with Ayn Rand. The ones roughly at that period whose works sound like her in some way are reactionary and supremely ultramontanist Catholics (very political and not very religious types, it is important to say!) in France trying to reverse everything that the French Revolution splattered on the world.
To suggest that the Promethean spirit isn’t present in the author of Prometheus (and Werther and Faust) is to make a huge philosophical mistake.
“Here I sit, forming people
In my image;
A race, to be like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and delight themselves,
And to mock you –
As I do!”
I am unclear what point you’re trying to make. Old people should stop complaining? Senior citizens should sell off their assets and liquidate their retirement portfolios and give the money to young people? Or is it supposed to be the reverse: people in retirement are clearly closer to where we need to be, so we need to focus most on improving the lot of the young while keeping the elderly where they are? Your income inequality points seem to suggest something like one of these two. Or is it simply making the more neutral point that while everybody has complaints, they are different complaints, so that the two groups should not be grouped together? This seems suggested by the opening. Or are we really stirring up class dissension between the ‘really bad off’ and the ‘not well enough off’? I can hardly think you’re trying to do that, but it’s just very unclear what the take-away from this post is supposed to be.
A report (“Kid’s Share”) from Brookings projects federal spending on children to decline to the point that it will be lower in 2020 than in 2005. Although the federal budget will not shrink, interest on debt, Social Security (not children’s benefits), Medicaid and Medicare are, and will continue to be barring any major changes of course, the largest federal expenditures.
@Brandon– The take-away from this post is:
“The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner.” -Benedict XVI, Caritas et Veritate
This is certainly not right. It would make the entire argument up to it pointless: the post is not giving an argument defending the C&V claim; the post does not argue that the inequality has grown in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner, merely that it has grown; the post doesn’t identify any of the economic choices involvedin the lead-up — in fact, his argument explicitly makes the lead-up a matter of luck rather than economic choices — the Tea Partiers lucked out on timing, the OWSers didn’t — and in the post he doesn’t give any proposal for what economic choices face us now or how we should respond to them. Indeed, the bulk of the post is almost entirely about the difference between OWS demographic and Tea Party demographic, and is an argument supporting the claim that there is an important difference, which would be entirely tangential to the point in C&V quotation, if that weren’t an additional step in the argument. I am very certain that Mark is more coherent in his thought than you are suggesting he is; I just don’t know what conclusion he’s actually expecting people to draw from putting the premises together, because I’m not sure which of the many problems in the vicinity of this topic he’s focusing on.
Plus, it’s clearly the case that the C&V quotation is an additional premise, not a conclusion: we have an identification of an inequality and a claim about inequality, with the conclusion to be drawn by the reader. It’s just not clear to me at all what conclusion we’re actually supposed to be drawing from putting the two together. Depending on how, exactly, one takes the former, one can get any number of different conclusions.
The conclusion you can draw, Brandon, is that OWSers and Tea Partiers view the economic system in very different ways at least in part because their average ages, and therefore the gap in their average net worths, are so dissmilar. Tea Partiers defend an economic system that has rewarded them to a greater relative degree than it has the prospect of rewarding the young. The quote from C&V is central to the discussion because households headed by young people are 62% poorer than similar households were 25 years ago.
I can certainly see the different demographic point. But again, this doesn’t clarify the conclusion you want in combining it with the C&V. The bulk of your post suggests strongly that sheer differential fortune in timing is a major, perhaps the major, reason for this young/old inequality; as you say, one group got in early, the other group got in late. That explains the difference in views well enough, but the C&V quote is specifically about economic choices. That means that luck and fortune have to be set aside for its purposes — they are precisely things that don’t fall under our capacity for choice; they may themselves occasion new economic choices, but they are not themselves matters of choice. I had thought as a possibility that you could intend for it to apply to precisely these new economic choices — i.e., given that now, there is this disparity, we have an obligation to make economic choices that will not increase this disparity “in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner”. That would make a lot of sense, although it would leave open the million dollar question — what do we have to do to avoid increasing the disparity in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner. But some things you say in the post and what you say in your comment here and some of your comments to Darwin above, seem to focus not on new economic choices but on economic choices that led to the disparity. Now, obviously major economic movements are not usually mere matters of luck, and they virtually always involve some economic choices, and certainly the C&V quotation would apply directly to them; but you’re pretty brief about any such economic choices in the post.
Similarly, the way you put it in this comment makes it sound that the big issue is that the Tea Party demographic is somehow running afoul of the point in the C&V quote by defending policies that gave them certain kinds of benefits; but it really seems like you’d have to say, in order to get this result, that either the inequality is due largely to their economic choices, or that they are defending the inequality itself. Consider a slightly different scenario in which we have two groups, both of whose economic status is deteriorating, but one group is very slowly declining while the other is plummeting. This generates a massive inequality. But, assuming that the one group is not actively fueling the inequality (e.g., it’s largely a matter of things that they have just by sheer luck), and assuming that they are not actively defending the inequality itself (as opposed to, say, merely trying to keep themselves from freefall and sometimes making mistakes), then the point in the C&V quote really doesn’t apply directly; the inequality is a mutual misfortune, not a moral failing: it’s not really due to their economic choices, and for the same reason we can’t really argue that the disparity is being increased in a morally unacceptable manner. It doesn’t change if one of them is slowly rising and one of them sinking quickly — and, I must say, it really hasn’t been shown that in this case the rising is anything other than modest, given all the issues senior citizens have to face.
In other words, your argument as it’s stated looks like it pushes two ways: on the one hand the difference in the demographics is largely a matter of historical contingency, on the other hand it’s an intimately moral matter. They can certainly be put together consistently, but there are lots of ways one could do so, depending on how exactly one interpreted the problem. But in the post (and in your comments) they are mostly just juxtaposed, with some ambiguous (mostly because they are in passing, without being explicitly related to anything else that’s been argued) comments, that don’t really gel the two together in any particular way. Don’t get me wrong — you may well have an excellent argument here, but I can’t see which one of all the possible arguments it’s supposed to be. The mere fact of increasing disparity is not enough; one needs to know what their economic choices are that are increasing it in an excessive and morally unacceptable way. It seems like you are wanting to say that you’ve in fact touched on this; but I don’t think it’s as clear how you’ve done so as you think it is.
“For their part, Tea Party ‘conservatives’ are having none of it. They are rigorously focused on the contrasts.”
Quite true – and so are the OWSers. Add this to the long line of scenarios in which groups that love to hate each other are basically blind to the similarities between them. I hasten to add that I am entirely averse to the Tea Party’s whole raison d’etre and more ambivalent about OWS, but one must admit that when the latter start talking about “taking the country back” it sounds disconcertingly familiar.
I’m not aware that OWSers have spent any time at all drawing contrasts between themselves and the Tea Party. On the other hand, Tea Party leaders have been very eager to distance themselves from the OWS movement, often in insulting terms.
In the Fordham survey of OWS protesters that I linked to above, the surveyer asked OWS protesters about their opinions of the Tea Party. Those opinions were 75% unfavorable and 7% favorable.
Jim Boyd, a columnist for something called the Dallas Conservative Examiner, has written that OWSers are an “assemblage of intellectually deplete vagrants.” Not to be outdone, the pontiff of Tea Party politics, Rush Limbaugh, referred to OWS as a “parade of human debris.”
I’m not agreeing with Limbaugh because I think some OWS protestors are people with valid concerns, but OWS would do well to try put a lid on the public urination, defecation, vandalism, and sexual assaults that some of its members are engaging in, that are tainting the movement.
@Brandon–It is my opinion that absolutely everything Mark points out in the body of the piece leads directly to the C&V quote. Mark pays you the courtesy of allowing you to do the math yourself, rather than spoon feeding it to you.
The gap between the Tea Party contingent and OWS contingent has been created by the Tea Partyers’ generation and is controlled by that contingent now. They have made the conscious decisions and put in place the policies that have left the OWS generation without a future. And having made those policies, they are now intent on consolidating their power and their wealth, and going out in style. They got theirs; they don’t care about those coming after them. That’s your 2+2=4. Now, cue the Pope, please.
You have a lot of assertion here, but it’s entirely unclear to me how the boomer generation and the one after it have systematically excluded my own generation from doing as well. (It would have to be a pretty subtle distinction anyway, as the average age Mark gives for the Tea Party above is 45 and the average age of the OWS crew is 33.)
Certainly, I have never encountered such an exclusion. Perhaps some here who belong to the older generation can shed some light on the dark plottings of their age mates?
All you need do, Darwin, is consider the ages of those in the top positions in government and most of corporate America; follow current events; and put two-and-two together. Nobody can do it for you.
Mark,
I am a bit perplexed, and need a guide. I don’t know how to answer something like that utterly tactfully. Does that mean — by the same logic — that Hobbes espoused a fearful mythology of sea monsters in writing the Leviathan?? Goethe was a vastly complex author. And the point of Werther, Faust, and Prometheus is at least as much about the dangers of all the emotions and reactions contained therein as it is about the mythological allusions, or poetical allusions, or stygian ones.
What I think is behind this is this. There was a tendency even when I was in the Church to construe everyone who does not agree with the institution as a crypto-Nietzschean. Filled with hubris and pride in human reason, and abilities, promethean, nihilistic, yadda yadda yadda. There is just one big problem with this. Most of the people who disagree with the Catholic church do so on the basis of a disagreement on the same valences of compassion, mercy and love based in Christianity. The legendary either/or is NOT between Catholicism’s assessment and a polar opposite. Rather it is about a variation, formed in the very same culture that the Catholic church inculcated in the West, but perhaps made more decent.
Spending on Social Security and Medicare has gone up quite a bit since 1984. Both programs are funded via regressive taxation, and involve taking money from a poorer cohort (the young) and giving it to a richer one (the old).
You can cite cutbacks to government spending on the non-elderly poor, but it’s not clear how that is supposed to refute the claim that the American welfare state is geared towards redistributing from young to old.
Even where a government program is ostensibly geared toward the non-elderly poor, much of the money ends up not going to folks at the bottom.
We do spend quite a bit of money on education. Funding for K-12 is slightly progressive, though not by much. Funding for college is regressive.
When you consider the nature of democracy, these facts are not so surprising, though people do often get irritated when you point them out.
@Blackadder–
“Spending on Social Security and Medicare has gone up quite a bit since 1984. Both programs are funded via regressive taxation, and involve taking money from a poorer cohort (the young) and giving it to a richer one (the old).”
There is also “money being taken” from all of those older people who are still working, and who are, in fact, at their peak earning years. And right now, many of those are still the Boomers, the largest demographic contingent in the workplace. It is true that once the Boomers have retired, there will be a larger contingent receiving Social Security and Medicare than there is now. But that will all be moot anyway, if the economy doesn’t recover. If you aren’t working, you aren’t paying into SSN.
It’s actually worth reading the Pew survey in detail, because it helpfully lists out a number of the factors which have resulted in households led by those over 65 increasing in net worth and those led by people under 35 decreasing in net worth.
Factors listed include:
- Those over 65 bought into the home market a long time ago, so they still have a lot of net gains from the run up in housing values since 1984. Those under 35 bought in fairly recently, so they’re more likely not to have equity in their homes.
- College debt is much more common and large in 2009 than in 1984.
- Those over 65 have a guaranteed inflation indexed income — those under 35 are subject to unemployment and underemployment (very high right now) and their wages are not necessarily increasing with the rate of inflation.
- Fewer young people are getting married and more are having children out of wedlock than in 1984. Marriage is strongly correllated with increasing net worth (people tend to think of the future more and they often have two incomes to work with) and single parenthood is negatively correllated with net worth.
- The demographic make up of the age groups are different, with more minorities and recent immigrants among those under 35 than among those over 65.
Finally, it’s woth noting the income component of all this. (Net worth is honestly a rather poor measure for ordinary households, especially of radically different ages, since most households spend the vast majority of what they make regardless of how much they make.) To quote the Pew survery: