I’m 43 years old, and like other members of my millennial generation, I’m not sure I’ll ever get Social Security benefits. It’s not top of mind for me right now, other than my role as a financial journalist, but the trust fund is due to run out in 2032, and the automatic 22% cut that follows won’t distinguish between who has been paying in and who has been drawing down.
But Social Security is perhaps the most vivid example of a pattern you see everywhere across the economy: Baby boomers hold the wealth, millennials carry the costs, Gen Z inherits the receipts. Several months ago, I used a metaphor first coined in 1974 by New York Times humorist Russell Baker to describe baby boomers’ impact on the economy around them: They are like a “pig in the python,” a bulge of 76 million being passed through America’s economic system, distorting everything along the way. A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, although it doesn’t use any generational framing, reinforces this fact.
The nonpartisan budget watchdog, revisiting one of its favorite subjects, found that Americans retiring this decade are on track to collect, in the form of entitlements, about 133% of everything they and their employers paid in taxes, measured in present-value dollars. Strip out the employer match, and the return nearly doubles: Roughly 265% of what workers put in themselves. A median-wage retiree in 2027 will collect about $730,000 in lifetime benefits on combined contributions of less than $200,000. The math holds together because today’s payroll taxes are covering the gap. Who pays those taxes, and who is retiring and collecting? Largely millennials and baby boomers, respectively.
