{"id":14373,"date":"2014-04-18T14:30:21","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T19:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/%year%\/%monthnum%\/%day%\/generational-equity-and-the-next-america\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T03:22:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T08:22:12","slug":"generational-equity-and-the-next-america","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2014\/04\/18\/generational-equity-and-the-next-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Generational equity and the \u2018Next America\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the week since we\u00a0published <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/next-america\/\">The Next America data essay<\/a>, a few critics\u00a0have portrayed our report as an effort to foment a \u201cgenerational war\u201d over Social Security and Medicare. Let me respond.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While the essay\u00a0(and <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/the-next-america-book\/\">companion book<\/a>)\u00a0is mainly about the sweeping demographic\u00a0changes now underway in America, it also addresses the financial\u00a0burdens that\u00a0those entitlement programs will place on future generations as our population ages.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is this an effort to start a Battle of the Ages? I certainly hope not. To the contrary, one of the goals of the essay and book is to highlight the trove of\u00a0demographic and attitudinal research my colleagues and I have conducted which\u00a0show that\u00a0young and old in America\u00a0aren&#8217;t\u00a0spoiling for a generational war \u2013 not over entitlements, nor any other realm of their increasingly interdependent lives. For example:<!--more--><\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>When Pew Research asked\u00a0a nationally-representative sample of adults last year if they see <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/next-america\/#Over-the-Horizon\">a\u00a0lot of conflict between young and old<\/a>, just 29% said they did. Many more respondents said they perceive group conflict between blacks and whites (39%); immigrants and the native born (55%);\u00a0 rich and poor (58%); and Democrats and Republicans (81%).<\/li>\n<li>One of the likely explanations for that relatively low level of generational tension\u00a0comes from another Pew Research finding: More than 50 million Americans, a record,\u00a0are <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/social-trends\/2011\/10\/03\/fighting-poverty-in-a-bad-economy-americans-move-in-with-relatives\/\">living under the same roof <\/a>in multi-generational family households, their fortunes braided together by the bonds of love and the stress of economic insecurity.<\/li>\n<li>Yet another\u00a0recent Pew Research survey found that\u00a0today\u2019s young adults get along better with their parents than older adults did when they were young.\u00a0And when we asked adults of all ages which generation\u00a0has the better moral values, young or old, <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/social-trends\/2009\/08\/12\/forty-years-after-woodstockbra-gentler-generation-gap\/\">about three-quarters of the young said\u00a0the old<\/a>. (The old agreed). It\u2019s hard to imagine the Baby Boomers saying the same back when\u00a0their coming-of-age rallying cry\u00a0was: \u201cNever trust anyone over 30.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These good vibrations across the generations are notable\u00a0because they flourish\u00a0at a time when young and old in America don\u2019t look, vote or think alike.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today\u2019s young, the 18-to-34 year olds known as Millennials, are the most racially diverse generation in American history; more than four in 10 are non-white. They\u2019re also the most Democratic-voting generation to come onto the scene in the four decades since the voting age was lowered to 18.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By contrast, today\u2019s seniors, about eight in ten of whom are white, tilt heavily Republican. As a result, the partisan differences by age among voters in the elections of 2008 and 2012 were the largest in the modern era.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today\u2019s young also have the unhappy distinction of being the first generation in modern history to have a lower standard of living than their parents\u2019 generation had at the same stage of the life cycle. Despite collecting\u00a0more college diplomas than any generation in history, Millennials lag behind their same-aged counterparts of yesteryear on virtually all key indicators of economic well-being \u2013 including employment, income, wealth, debt and poverty. Half a century ago, the old were by far the poorest age group in America. Today it is the young.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In addition to\u00a0documenting\u00a0these trends, the essay and book\u00a0point out the financial stresses that Social Security and Medicare will face\u00a0as 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 every single day between now and 2030. By the time all\u00a0in that famously large pig-in-a-python generation have\u00a0crossed the threshold into old age, Social Security will only be able to pay 77% of promised benefits, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssa.gov\/oact\/trsum\/\">2013 report<\/a>\u00a0from the system&#8217;s\u00a0two public trustees,\u00a0Democrat Robert D. Reischauer and Republican Charles P. Blahous III.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As they put it: \u201cThis information highlights the importance, from an equity perspective, of enacting a solution promptly enough so that more generations contribute to correcting the program\u2019s financing shortfall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are several reasons for the solvency problems of Social Security and Medicare. One is the simple, unsparing arithmetic of longer life spans and lower birth rates, which inevitably leads to fewer workers supporting more retirees. Another\u00a0is the\u00a0runaway cost of health care, which for decades has been rising at a rate well above inflation.\u00a0And a third is the financing structure of Social Security,\u00a0which is largely \u201cpay-as-you-go\u201d rather than \u201cpre-funded.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s not what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in mind when he created Social Security in 1935. He favored a pre-funded financing structure \u2013 in which the payroll taxes paid by workers would be saved by the government and returned to them in the form of a pension, much the way private sector pension plans operate. But with the economy still mired in the Great Depression, and with poverty still rampant among the elderly, Congress\u00a0was eager to get Social Security benefits flowing out more quickly to recipients. Through a series of amendments in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it\u00a0converted Social Security to a largely pay-as-you-go system, in which\u00a0payments to current beneficiaries\u00a0come from\u00a0taxes on current workers.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That change produced windfalls for the first few generations of recipients, who collectively have received many\u00a0trillions of dollars more in benefits than they paid in taxes.\u00a0 Now, however, as the system has matured, as life spans have grown longer and as birth rates have declined,\u00a0 Social Security\u2019s own actuaries and trustees say that, absent changes to the program, today\u2019s and tomorrow\u2019s young stand to get back much less in less in benefits than they\u2019ll pay in taxes.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And they know it. According to a Pew Research survey taken earlier this year, just 6% of Millennials say they expect to receive full Social Security benefits when they retire. Fully half say they expect to get\u00a0 nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even so, Social Security and Medicare remain the nation\u2019s most\u00a0popular domestic programs. Nearly nine in 10 Americans of all generations say they are good for the country.\u00a0 Understandably so: Without them, about four in ten\u00a0seniors would be poor. Because of them, only about one in 10 is poor. This is a blessing not just for the seniors, but for everyone who loves, supports and depends on seniors \u2013 which is to say, everyone.<\/p>\n\n<p>[will land]<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"p1 wp-block-paragraph\"><span class=\"s1\">Does this mean a generational war? Let\u2019s hope not.<\/span>\u00a0We live at a time when there are large generational differences on many political issues, but Social Security and Medicare have not become a\u00a0source of conflict between old and young, even though they\u00a0have <a href=\"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/social-trends\/2012\/12\/20\/the-big-generation-gap-at-the-polls-is-echoed-in-attitudes-on-budget-tradeoffs\/\">some different views<\/a> about how the program should be reformed.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"p1 wp-block-paragraph\">As the fiscal stresses on these programs mount, it\u2019s possible this will change. But if Am<span class=\"s1\">ericans <\/span>of all ages <span class=\"s1\">can bring to the public square the same genius for generational interdependence they bring to their family lives, the politics of <\/span>entitlement reform <span class=\"s1\">will be less toxic and the policy choices less daunting. That\u2019s a big if.\u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s also <span class=\"s1\">the most promising <\/span>way to frame the conversation.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few critics have portrayed our report as an effort to foment a \u201cgenerational war\u201d over Social Security and Medicare. Let me respond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"sub_headline":null,"sub_title":"","_crdt_document":"","_prc_public_revisions":[],"_ppp_expiration_hours":0,"_ppp_enabled":false,"ai_generated_summary":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"relatedPosts":[],"_prc_fork_parent":0,"_prc_fork_status":"","_prc_active_fork":0,"datacite_doi":"","datacite_doi_citation":"","_prc_seo_qr_attachment_id":0,"spoken_article_player_enabled":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,204,239,199,114,241],"bylines":[980],"collection":[],"datasets":[],"_post_visibility":[],"formats":[467],"_fund_pool":[],"languages":[],"regions-countries":[515],"research-teams":[],"class_list":["post-14373","short-read","type-short-read","status-publish","hentry","category-generations-age","category-comparison-of-generations","category-economic-inequality","category-millennials","category-social-security-medicare","category-wealth","bylines-paul-taylor","formats-short-read","regions-countries-united-states"],"label":"Short Read","post_parent":0,"word_count":1145,"canonical_url":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2014\/04\/18\/generational-equity-and-the-next-america\/","art_direction":false,"_embeds":[],"table_of_contents":[],"datacite_doi":"","prc_seo_data":{"title":"Generational equity and the \u2018Next America\u2019","description":"A few critics have portrayed our report as an effort to foment a \u201cgenerational war\u201d over Social Security and Medicare. 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