America is getting old.
Between 1960 and 2024, the share of Americans over 65 doubled — from 9 percent to 18 percent. And the US will only grow grayer in the coming years. Within a decade, America’s seniors will outnumber its children for the first time in history, according to Census Bureau projections. By 2060, those over 65 are expected to comprise about one quarter of the population.
This demographic transition will be a defining fact of the 21st century, shaping nearly every part of American life. But its political implications are liable to be especially profound — and immediate: Seniors already accounted for 29 percent of the US electorate in 2024.
Older voters have always exerted disproportionate political influence, due to their exceptionally high turnout rates. Historically, however, seniors’ power was limited by their small share of the population. Now, that constraint is steadily loosening.
This could be a problem for America’s rising generations. US public policy has long disfavored the young. By international standards, our welfare state offers meager support to families with children, even as it provides robust benefits for retirees. And the latter programs are likely to consume an ever-larger share of the federal budget in the coming decades, a shift that could burden younger Americans with higher tax rates or borrowing costs, while crowding out new spending on their needs. Our nation’s housing policies, meanwhile, privilege (disproportionately older) homeowners over renters.
Seniors’ growing electoral clout could deepen these imbalances. And there are signs it already has. As the electorate has aged over the last few years, economic policy has grown even more tilted against the young.
This drift towards gerontocracy — government of, by, and for the old — doesn’t just undermine the interests of millennials or zoomers. It also threatens the prosperity of America as a whole.
State governments are soaking the young
In states across the country, governments have recently shifted tax burdens away from older generations and toward younger ones.
In some cases, this elder bias is explicit and intentional. Since 2022, Texas, Colorado, Iowa, and Pennsylvania have all slashed property taxes specifically for homeowners 65 or older. At the same time, a slew of states have begun exempting retirement income from taxation. Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and West Virginia ended taxes on Social Security benefits, while Iowa abolished the taxation of all forms of retirement income — from 401(k) withdrawals to pension benefits — for residents over 55.
The principal function of these measures is not to rescue cash-strapped seniors from poverty. Federal rules already shield indigent retirees from income taxes. Broad exemptions deliver the bulk of their benefits to the affluent. An analysis of Illinois’s long-standing tax breaks on retirement income found that households earning over $175,000 collected 60 percent of the benefits. Research into the distributional implications of other states’ exemptions has yielded similar findings.
And tax policies that explicitly favor the old are only part of the story. There has also been a broader turn against property taxes on all existing homeowners — a shift that tends to benefit affluent seniors at younger families’ expense.
The present rebellion against property taxation has been remarkably widespread. Texas has enacted especially steep cuts, reducing property taxes by $18 billion in 2023. But less sweeping reductions have passed in Georgia, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Idaho, among other places. And more ambitious reforms may be in the offing: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has floated a plan to eliminate all property taxes in his state.
The aging of the electorate did not singlehandedly kick off this tax-cutting trend. Rather, the primary trigger was post-COVID inflation, which raised homeowners’ tax bills by increasing their properties’ nominal value (if the price level goes up, the market value of your home typically will too).
Nevertheless, policymakers’ focus on this dimension of the cost-of-living crisis likely reflected seniors’ disproportionate political influence. Although plenty of millennial homeowners have benefited from property tax cuts, younger Americans as a whole stand to gain less — and lose more — from such measures than older ones do.
The reasons for this are simple. Nearly 79 percent of US seniors own their homes, while only 39 percent of Americans under 35 do. And property tax cuts deliver larger benefits for homeowners than for renters.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem for younger generations, if property tax cuts did not need to be paid for. But they generally do. In the long run, maintaining lower levies on property typically requires states to either charge higher sales and income taxes or pare back government services. In either case, younger Americans will disproportionately bear the burdens. Working-age people pay more in income taxes than retirees, and they’re also more likely to have young children, whose school systems rely on property tax revenue. Funding constraints are already leading some municipalities to scale back their commitments to public education. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of US school districts in session only four days a week jumped from 650 to nearly 900.
Meanwhile, some recent property tax cuts massively favor longtime homeowners over first-time buyers. In 2024, Georgia and Alabama both capped the amount that a homeowner’s assessed property value can rise in a given year. Over time, these policies can have radically inequitable consequences.
This is well-illustrated by Florida’s longstanding cap on assessment growth. In the Sunshine State, a home’s taxable value cannot rise by more than 3 percent annually, no matter how much its market price has changed, so long as its current homeowner maintains possession. Since much of Florida’s real estate has appreciated at a far faster pace, this policy has opened up a massive gap between how much longtime homeowners and new buyers must pay in taxes for the same properties. According to a report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a young family purchasing a Miami townhouse in 2024 would owe three times as much in property taxes as an older neighbor who’d been occupying an identical unit since 2006.
America’s welfare state shortchanges the young
As state lawmakers were tilting tax codes in seniors’ favor, Congress was shifting social spending in the same direction.
As already noted, America’s welfare state has long given short shrift to young families. In 2021, the United States spent just 0.6 percent of its GDP on benefits for children and their parents — far below the OECD average of 2.3 percent.
That same year, America spent 7.2 percent of GDP on public pensions, placing it only a bit behind the OECD average of 8.5 percent. And this disparity is partly attributable to the fact that America is younger than the typical rich country.
The federal budget’s age bias would have deepened over the past four years, even if legislators hadn’t changed a single policy. The baby boom generation’s drift into retirement — combined with the healthcare sector’s climbing costs — would have been sufficient to push up the share of spending dedicated to seniors.
But Congress accelerated this trend by expanding social benefits for the old, while cutting spending on programs that primarily benefit working-age Americans.
The Biden administration did not intend this outcome. With the aid of a Democratic Congress, it established a new monthly benefit for families with young children in 2021. But the White House only found the political will to fund this program for a single year.
By contrast, Biden oversaw a permanent expansion in elder benefits. At the end of 2024, Congress passed a bill effectively increasing Social Security payments to public-sector workers, at an annual cost of nearly $20 billion.
This law addressed a nuance in the pre-existing entitlement system: Many public sector workers are not subject to Social Security taxes, as they pay into their own separate pension plans instead. For this reason, they traditionally did not receive full Social Security benefits in addition to their public pensions, even if they worked briefly in the private sector before retirement. The 2024 law changed this, enabling public-sector workers to collect both their pensions and full Social Security benefits.
Many analysts decried this arrangement as unfair. In their view, a worker who did not pay into Social Security with every paycheck should not receive the same benefits as one who did. And providing full benefits to workers who are already receiving public pensions may undermine the progressivity of the Social Security program, while accelerating the exhaustion of its trust fund.
Nevertheless, in a striking testament to older voters’ political clout, congressional Republicans supported the law. Which is to say: The GOP increased welfare benefits for an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency (public sector workers are left-leaning), in a manner that struck many technocratic experts as excessively generous. It is hard to imagine conservatives getting on board with such a proposal, were its beneficiaries younger than 65.
Yet Trump’s GOP has largely embraced social spending that is explicitly earmarked for seniors. Under Donald Trump, Republicans have forsworn cuts to Social Security and Medicare — and created new tax benefits for the old — even as they’ve made large spending cuts to programs that primarily benefit Americans under 65.
To be sure, the GOP did finance its regressive tax cuts this year with large reductions in Medicaid spending, which will adversely impact many older Americans. But Medicaid primarily benefits non-retirees. And Trump concentrated his cuts on prime-age Americans, many of whom will lose coverage due to Medicaid’s new work requirements, which do not apply to seniors.
The president’s policies are most lamentable for their socioeconomic implications, not their generational ones. As a result of his Medicaid cuts, more low-income Americans of all ages will struggle to secure the care they need. And his food stamp cuts will make it harder for the impoverished to feed themselves. His agenda has, in effect, taken from the poor to give to the upper middle class and wealthy.
Yet it is also true that the past four years of policymaking have left America with a welfare state even more heavily weighted towards seniors than it had been before.
America is slouching toward Bologna
The economic conflicts between the generations should not be exaggerated. Most young people plan to get old someday. Americans of all ages, therefore, have an interest in their government maintaining robust Medicare and Social Security benefits. And there is no reason in principle why such entitlements must come at the expense of social spending on the young.
If the United States raised taxes on the rich and middle-class, forced down our medical providers’ exorbitant payment rates, and enacted growth-enhancing economic reforms, then we could plausibly sustain generous entitlement benefits while creating a child allowance for young parents, expanding unemployment benefits for the jobless, and guaranteeing healthcare coverage for all.
But this is not our current social bargain. Rather, America’s present arrangement entails:
- Steadily lowering taxes on affluent Americans in general and older ones in particular.
- Preserving the US health care industry’s exceptionally high prices.
- Suppressing our economy’s growth potential with restrictive immigration and labyrinthine permitting requirements.
- And letting younger generations bear a disproportionate share of the resulting costs in the form of more austere social benefits, higher borrowing costs, lower real wages, and — at least potentially — much larger tax bills later in life (US federal spending is increasingly debt-financed and it’s not clear whether this can be sustained indefinitely).
The losers of this system are not uniformly young, and the winners aren’t universally old. Nonetheless, there is reason to fear that the graying of the US electorate will reinforce our political economy’s pathologies. After all, seniors are relatively insulated from its inequities and inefficiencies. And across countries, older voters tend to prioritize their narrow material interests over both spending on children and economic growth, while also opposing liberal immigration policies. Partly for these reasons, democracies older than the US — such as Italy and Japan — have suffered from tepid growth and wildly age-biased public spending.
The US can still stay young at heart
America isn’t necessarily doomed to continue on its present trajectory.
Although seniors’ share of the electorate is steadily growing, the vast majority of voters will remain under 65 for decades to come. Older Americans owe their influence not merely to sheer numbers, but also to their higher rates of political engagement and organization. The young could theoretically choose to follow their elders’ example and organize in defense of their own interests.
The Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement offers a case in point. Composed largely of young renters, YIMBY organizations across the country have agitated against zoning policies that privilege homeowners over tenants. YIMBYs’ fundamental aim — to make housing abundant and affordable —would benefit renters of all ages and make America as a whole more prosperous. Nevertheless, tight restrictions on homebuilding impose greater costs on the young than the old. Thus, absent YIMBYs’ mobilization, America was likely to adopt more restrictive housing policies as it grew older. Instead, municipalities across the country have made it easier to build homes in recent years.
If younger voters stand up for their broader material interests in a similar fashion, America’s political economy just might age gracefully.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
