March 04, 2014
In the last three decades the rich have gotten the bulk of the benefits of economic growth, as those at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution have seen little improvement in living standards. This naturally leads many people to want to reverse the policies that have led to this upward redistribution, such as high unemployment, a trade policy that protects high end workers, while subjecting the middle and bottom to international competition, government subsidies to too big to fail banks, an ever more intrusive patent policy, an anti-trust policy that greenlights monopolies like Microsoft, and many others that could be added to this list.
Of course the winners of the last three decades don’t want the public to consider policies that might reverse this upward redistribution, so instead they do things like try to promote generational conflict, claiming that the troubles of younger workers are somehow attributable to their parents Social Security and Medicare. Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson is a leader in such efforts, having funded numerous groups for this purpose.
NPR did its part in the promotional of generational war, interviewing Paul Taylor, the executive vice president at Pew Research Center about his new book. Taylor repeatedly complained that younger generations don’t seem angry about their parents’ Social Security and Medicare. He told his interviewer:
“Well, what’s so fascinating is there isn’t any tension at the moment. You have a generation coming in that isn’t wagging its finger with blame at mom or grandma, in fact, they’re living with mom and grandma.”
Later he adds:
“I leave this book thinking we have very serious demographically driven challenges, that we have a political system that at the moment isn’t stepping up to the plate, but we have a population that isn’t spoiling for a fight over these issues.”
In addition to expressing his disappointment that the young don’t share his antagonism to older people over their Social Security and Medicare, Taylor also seriously misrepresents some key points about these programs and the burdens they face. He tells listeners:
“Things are out of balance. Our Social Security and Medicare systems, which, in the public’s mind, have done brilliantly in doing what they set out to do, they were based on the demographics of the 20th century. You had, literally, at the beginning, 150 workers per retiree, by the time all the baby boomers move into taking those programs, we’ll only have two workers per retiree.
“The math of those programs does not work. Everybody who looks at the demographics knows that those systems are going broke with 15 or 20 years and the longer you wait, the more the burden of the solution is going to fall on the millennials.”
Actually, the demographics have long been known to the people who designed these programs and were predicted almost perfectly many decades ago. Furthermore, the projected shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare can be met with tax increases on the millennials that are considerably smaller than the tax increases faced by the baby boomers.
The key issue is whether we continue to see the upward redistribution of the last three decades or whether the gains from growth are broadly shared. The Social Security Trustees project that average compensation will increase by more than 50 percent over the next three decades. If the wages of typical worker increase in step with the average then it would be difficult to see the generational injustice if their payroll taxes increased by two to three percentage points, especially since this will be needed in order to support their own longer retirements.
It is striking that NPR is willing to focus so much more attention on the threat to the living standards of millennials presented by a 2-3 percentage point increase in payroll taxes than the policies that could lead to much or all of the benefits of productivity growth over the next three decades going to those at the top, as has been the case for the last three decades.
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