A more diverse distribution of money and power could potentially benefit people of all ages. But to get there, what steps can we take toward intergenerational justice?

Guests

Samuel Moyn, professor at Yale Law School. Author of “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It.”

Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of “Run for Something,” an organization that recruits younger candidates to run for office.

Also Featured

Jonathan Heathcote, monetary advisor in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Welcome to the final episode of On Point’s special series, Senior Class: Gerontocracy in America. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and this week we’ve looked at the sources of generational divides in the U.S. Today, let’s talk about solutions, and we’ve got ideas from all across the country, from Hawaii —

Living with family is going to be the only way to be able to survive the costs that override the income that’s possible for our generation.

CHAKRABARTI: Vermont.

Why aren’t the baby boomers, myself included, helping the next generation get into homes? Why aren’t they donating, giving the money to their children? Why are they holding onto it?

CHAKRABARTI: Virginia.

I really see the solution to wealth and power imbalance between generations being broken down into three main categories, healthcare, housing, and workplaces. For each of these categories, I really think a socialized, democratized approach is the solution here.

CHAKRABARTI: New Mexico.

It is the debasement of the currency over the last 50 years since going off the gold standard and financializing our economy that has allowed the boomers to achieve what they’ve achieved. Unless we go back onto a hard money standard, this will not be solved.

CHAKRABARTI: Texas.

The solution, I believe, requires a mature principle of justice, namely that other people’s children matter as much as our own.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s just to name a few of the listeners we’ve heard from over the past week, and we’ll hear from a lot more throughout the show today.

I’ve gotta say, this series really did touch a nerve. Multiple nerves, actually. We have heard from so many of you. Some of you told us the series is insulting and disrespectful to seniors who are not wealthy. Others said I was actually too hard on millennials and Gen Z, that I didn’t empathize enough with younger folks who are too disenchanted to vote.

Now, I’m telling you this because we really do read and listen to all of your messages, and this time around, I’d say I noticed a strong pattern. The theme kind of was that we are all still pitting one generation against the other. There’s this unspoken presumption that life in America is a zero-sum game.

But what if it’s not? I’d argue that, in fact, it most certainly is not in what is the richest country in the world. What if the very best solutions, the very best set of solutions, are the ones that defend the vulnerable and elderly and empower the young? What do those solutions look like, and what would it take to actually make them happen?

Samuel Moyn is back with us. He’s a professor of law at Yale University and author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It. He’s been bookending this series. Professor Moyn, welcome back.

SAMUEL MOYN: It’s a thrill to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So like I said, we touched a nerve.

But I do wanna ask you Professor Moyn, I believe it’s your phrase in the process of this series, you said once that generational justice requires generational solidarity. What do you mean by that?

MOYN: There’s gotta be a little bit of adversarialism when we just look at America, and we’ve got to tell the truth about how unfair it is intergenerationally.

But it’s also the case that a lot of older Americans are hurting and don’t get enough even while younger people are treated unfairly. And more than that, all of our causes that, about justice have involved crossing lines, the civil rights movement, the emancipation of women. And so why not think that we can all together, across generational lines, confront this inequity that has come about in our time?

CHAKRABARTI: So are you saying there’s something more fundamental like actually it’s hard to think of things more fundamental than age but something more primal in terms of determining the quality of American life than age, and that’s something that people can come together on in order to find solutions that benefit all?

MOYN: I hope that we can come together on justice. A lot of white people gave up privileges when there was a civil rights movement that redistributed some of their power and wealth where it belonged. And of course, we’re not done with that process. But the same could happen now that we live in a gerontocracy.

And more than that, I think that it’s great for us as we age to think of us as being part of our own succession. That doesn’t mean we need to leave the stage prematurely or when we still have a lot to contribute, but that also means that we do have to be generous, more generous than we’ve been to those who are going eventually to take our place.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Sam, let me say that we caught the attention of AARP after our second episode in this series, and Sarah Lovenheim, Vice President of External Relations for AARP, reached out and wanted to clarify some of the, the goals of this massive elder or senior advocacy group in America.

And it’s interesting because what she pointed out, I want to talk with you about because it’s about this intersection between the interests of the young and seniors in America. She said in a statement, quote, “At AARP, our mission is simple. Empower people to choose how they live as they age. That takes financial security, good health, and peace of mind.”

Then she goes into several examples of AARP’s advocacy on that. The sstatement goes on and says, “When older Americans are on solid ground, everyone benefits. They provide more than a trillion dollars in unpaid care every year, not because it’s easy. Weaken Social Security or Medicare and you don’t just hurt older adults, you hurt the families and communities that depend on them.” End quote.

Now, I want to say that we have the full text of the AARP statement at our website, onpointradio.org. But Professor Moyn, and I wanted to get your response to that.

MOYN: Everyone deserves an advocate, and certainly older Americans do and they have one in the AARP, which is a cause organization.

And the trouble I think is that everyone else lacks the money and the muscle that AARP has in our political system. More than that, I think, a cause organization for one group of people is not … the right organization to ask about how we achieve this kind of cross-age, intergenerational justice project.

So AARP is great, but we also need other organizations, and we need a politics that transcends the divisions among age cohorts.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, in fact, you make that point in your book, Gerontocracy in America, that the issue isn’t the existence of the AARP, it’s really that there’s no … one of the issues is that there’s no analogous advocacy group for, the now larger swath of younger Americans in this country.

Okay. Sam, I have to say with this thought of intergenerational justice and intergenerational solidarity in mind, I do want to focus on one part of the book that comes as a surprise to me. When you ask us to rethink how we even conceive of aging in this country, and it has to do with bioethicist Daniel Callahan.

So hang on here with me for a second, Sam, because you opened my eyes to Callahan. He made waves in the 1980s when he published a book called Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society, and Callahan takes this very extreme view that Americans need to rethink how we approach things like extensive medical care for the elderly.

He asks if terminating life-extending treatment for people after a certain age is a better approach than extending life as long as humanly possible with medical intervention. So here’s Callahan on CUNY TV’s The Open Mind in 2009.

CALLAHAN: I think we have a health care system which is dependent on that primary value of progress and constant more. There’s never enough. No matter how well people are, they are not happy because they will eventually get sick and they’ll die of something. And I think if people really lived to be 150, the doctor’s offices would still be full, the hospitals would have plenty of business. People would be complaining about death and dying and keep me alive, doctor.

CHAKRABARIT: Okay, so that’s controversial. Some people might even say morally bankrupt. But Callahan fought back against those criticisms. He argued that people need to recognize that the expense, in his view, of certain types of health care for individuals may outweigh the benefits for the country.

CALLAHAN: I think the first step will probably not be formal rationing.

I would think some programs like Medicare now will support some very expensive surgeries, very expensive drugs, which only have minimal patient benefit. Cancer drugs will cost you $80,000 a year, which will give you 1.5 extra months of life, and I think that kind of thing will probably get lopped off.

And … they’ll say, “Look, we can’t afford these extraordinarily expensive procedures and chemotherapy and the like, where the life expectancy is a very short life expectancy.” But that’s very hard because interestingly, Medicare, ever since 1965 has been forbidden by Congress to take cost into account as it determines what benefits it will provide.

Doctors don’t want it because doctors don’t want government telling them how to treat patients.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, by the way, I should say that when Callahan himself got much older, he definitely partook in the medical care available to him, so interesting. His overall argument though, Samuel, is that he was concerned that elderly Americans would consider care at all costs as a right.

Why did you even bring Callahan into the thinking of your book? Because it seems so far afield.

MOYN: It’s true and my own view is that we shouldn’t even think about rationing certainly not anytime soon. But I think Callahan was right to think about setting limits, and if not to how long we live then to how much power we get to retain indefinitely.

And there, his ideas are a precious resource because he says we should think about what the point of our lives is and not just perpetuate our lives if you like, mindlessly. And we all will die and I’d love to live as long as the doctors can keep me alive, but that doesn’t mean I keep my power indefinitely or my wealth indefinitely.

So how do I live gracefully into my old age while keeping my daughters in mind and my society in mind, and engaging in this succession that we’re all involved in?

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: One of the first things that we got a cascade of suggestions on had to do with politicians and two words essentially. Here they are.

I believe there should be an age limit to our politicians.

The political class should have term limits.

Term limit.

Term limits.

Term limits.

Term limits.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Moyn, this one is a, seems like an obvious solution.

Also a popular one amongst average Americans. Your take on the feasibility of term limits to control, like you said, that consolidation of political power amongst the elected elderly.

MOYN: They are popular. Age limits almost equally popular. There is the trouble that the Supreme Court thinks the Constitution prohibits them.

But, we know that —

CHAKRABARTI: The age unlimited Supreme Court.

MOYN: That’s right. It’s itself life tenured. Term limits have been tried at the state level, and honestly, they only bring the average age of politicians down a tiny bit. I like age limits if we’re really concerned about the cognitive decline or outright death of politicians, in part because we know politicians are starting their careers later.

But as we talked about the other day, we should have some older representatives, so maybe the best thing is to try things like youth quotas, which would insist that there be politicians of different ages all the way through the age spectrum.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. We don’t have quotas now.

I imagine that constitutionally them also might be quite challenging if it became a concrete proposal. But what we do have is something else. We have a growing amount of activism amongst younger people to run for something. So Professor Moyn, hang on here for just a second ’cause I wanna bring Amanda Litman into the conversation.

She is co-founder and president of the group Run for Something. It’s an organization that recruits younger candidates to run for office. She’s also author of When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. Amanda Litman, welcome to On Point.

AMANDA LITMAN: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so what inspired you to create Run for Something?

LITMAN: I worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign, and after we lost, I started hearing from friends I’d gone to high school and college with who were like, “Hey, Amanda, I’m thinking about running for office. Where do I go? Who do I call?” And at the time, in the end of 2016, if you were in your mid-20s and you were newly excited about politics and you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was no entry point for you.

So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea, what if we solve this problem? And my co-founder … and I wrote a plan, and we built a website, and then we launched Run for Something on Trump’s first Inauguration Day back in 2017, with the goal of recruiting and supporting young, diverse leaders to run for state and local office all across the country.

CHAKRABARTI: So you’re looking at the not the federal level as the first entrée into elected office. One more thing first about your own experience in Washington. I’ve heard that maybe you also got tired of being the youngest person in the room after how many years?

LITMAN: Ugh, it’s still true. I’m now 36 years old, and in most rooms of political donors or political activists, I am somehow still one of the youngest people, which is telling of how much the establishment class has stayed the same over the last decade.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let me ask you, one might think that it’s maybe, quote-unquote, easier in terms of finances and sophistication of operation to run for a local office.

We’ll put state office aside for just a moment. I don’t know mayor or a selectman for your city or some school committee, what have you. But Amanda, don’t some of the same barriers, particularly financial and time exist at the local level as they do for any higher-level office for young people?

LITMAN: The structures of these institutions shapes who is able to enter them. So yeah, a lot of these city councils and school boards and library boards, they expect you to be able to do full-time work without paying at all and without counting on you to have a full-time job outside of it.

Many of them do not provide childcare. I don’t think, almost none do. Many of them require nights and weekends and full-time participation. It’s really hard. But we have found that young people can do it anyway if they’re committed, and that a lot of them are entering these institutions and then changing the rules and changing the structure so that they can be the first, not the last.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Moyn, jump back in here. First of all, I want to get your thoughts on again, just the sort of structure, the financial structure of modern-day political campaigning in America, and whether are there changes, legal changes that can be made to make, to lower the barriers that Amanda’s been talking about for younger people?

MOYN: Absolutely. Props to her and David Hogg and so many others who are trying to inject young blood into the American political system. The trouble is that the electorate is so old, and the donor class is so old. And so the biggest thing I think we could do most easily would be to shift as quickly as we can to public finance of elections.

And that would level the playing field among the generations. And so no matter what age you are when you decide to run for office, you could access public funding and compete fairly against those who you’re trying to unseat.

CHAKRABARTI: But doesn’t that already exist? There’s optional public funding, right? But campaigns almost always decline it because it limits how much they can spend.

MOYN: Of course. Of course. So that’s right. But it would have to displace the private funding a lot more than we do, and either make it attractive to take the public funding or just ban private funding, like in many countries.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Amanda, you heard Professor Moyn earlier talk about this phrase, I’m just stealing it from him, about generational solidarity. And also the fact that when it comes to the voters that a young candidate has to win over they do tilt much older than that candidate. So I’m wondering how you advise young candidates on, like, where can they find that generational solidarity when speaking to or even advocating for policies when with older voters?

LITMAN: Yeah, I’d say two things here. One is that our candidates over the last 10 years have been really pleasantly surprised to find that the older voters they meet at the doors are often the most excited about their campaigns, because it’s really inspiring to see a young person who cares enough to run for office and to put their name on the ballot.

They’re often some of their biggest boosters. The second thing is that we really encourage candidates to frame the problem in the perspective of the voter. For a young person, when you’re talking about housing as an example, it’s thinking about what does it mean to be probably a renter right now, or a first-time home buyer, and how can you change the laws so that you could have access to the American dream?

For an older person, it might be how can we make sure that you can have your family close to you, that you can afford to live near your grandkids? Or the reverse, your grandkids can afford to live near you. How can we make sure that you can be near the family and that your family can afford to be here?

So it’s a slightly different framing.

CHAKRABARTI: What about let’s talk about a couple more specifics, like with the preservation or shoring up of Social Security. There’s one program that has 100% overlap between seniors and young people in terms of trying to keep Social Security both solvent and strong in the long term.

But there, some of the ideas, for example, like increasing the retirement age before you can qualify for receiving your Social Security benefits, or lifting the cap on the FICA tax so that people who are making more money actually pay more in Social Security, some of those things might actually then start showing a little bit of daylight between the young and seniors.

And how do you see that issue?

LITMAN: For our local candidates, Social Security isn’t really a live issue. But for ones who are talking about it or talking more broadly about the kind of tax policy that disproportionately affects older Americans, you know, again, put it in their best interest.

Think about the quality of life that they want to have, not just for them, but for their kids or their grandkids, their neighbors, the young people in their life. And to really make sure you talk about what is the value behind this? It matters that old people shouldn’t have to live in poverty, that you shouldn’t have to work until you die, and how can we make sure that system exists, not just for you, but for the people who come after you?

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Moyn, jump in here. I’d love your thoughts at any time.

MOYN: I love Amanda’s framing. She’s right that in the end, especially when the electorate is so old, we need to speak about intergenerational solidarity as something that it is good for all and it’s the morally right thing to do even if it means rebalancing who gets what in our society.

The Social Security issue is going to be very real in public debate very quickly because the trust fund is going to run out in 2032, and there’s going to be a big debate about how to save the program, whether to save it. And some of the ideas you mentioned, Meghna are right on, and I agree with Amanda that many older Americans want to help. They recognize the unfairness and can be recruited for the cause.

The question is, how do we speak plainly about the kind of privileges that they are reaping in many cases, and how do we get them nonetheless to see beyond their identity as older Americans and think about the future of the country?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so one thing that I just want to say clearly, because we always hear from people about this, that when we use language like the trust fund will go bankrupt in however many years from now, it’s right on the horizon. Just to be specific about it, what that means is that it’s not that Social Security’s going away, right?

It’s just that the amount, the ability of the government to pay out full benefits is going to go down, right? It could drop by as much as 30%. So that’s what it means when the trust fund is threatened with bankruptcy.

So Samuel Moyn and Amanda Litman, hang on here for just a second, because there’s this question that if we were to get more young people, and the other thing is when we’re saying young, we’re not saying like 18, 19, although some teenagers do run for office. Talking about people in their 20s, 30s, 40s even. Do they actually bring with the freshness of their life experience and their ideas, do they bring better governance with them? Do they bring more effective governance, or is maybe something lost with the loss of that seniority?

So Layla Zaidane is president and CEO of Future Caucus. They’re the largest nonpartisan organization of young lawmakers, also already elected, in the United States, and Layla says effective leadership from a more age-diverse political cohort begins with —

LAYLA ZAIDANE: Trust is everything. A democracy depends on the consent of the governed, and if you don’t feel like you belong, then that contract starts to break down. And so when I think about what our goal is in helping the next generation of elected officials work together to solve problems on behalf of the American people.

CHAKRABARTI: Future Caucus is a membership organization for Millennial and Gen Z lawmakers, and Zaidane says their model works. The Center for Effective Lawmaking did an analysis of every member of Congress and state legislatures as well across the country, and found that Future Caucus members were 24% more effective than their peers.

 ZAIDANE: In the last legislative session, at the state level, only about 25% of state lawmakers were young, were Millennial or Gen Z, 25%, but they passed 40% of bipartisan legislation that got signed into law. And so they really are punching above their weight when you just look at the numbers. And once again, that’s at the state level.

CHAKRABARTI: Despite these numbers, Zaidane says that the battle for keeping younger people in office doesn’t end when they get elected.

 ZAIDANE: When you look at what it takes to be in public service right now, political violence has skyrocketed. The average pay for a state lawmaker is $20,000 less than what the average American worker earns. A lot of members of Future Caucus drive Uber or do DoorDash to make ends meet. If we can’t make it more affordable to be in public service, then we’re just gonna have the same kinds of people in elected office who come from the same backgrounds.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Layla Zaidane of Future Caucus. Amanda Litman especially about Layla’s last point there, that at the state and local level it can actually just be a financial strain on young people to even be in office.

I’m wondering if you have thoughts about that.

LITMAN: It’s so real. Layla’s spot on that, and something we hear from a lot of candidates where they wish they could run for the office, or aspiring candidates rather, but they just can’t afford to. One of the more hot takes I have is that we should increase pay for all legislators, and all legislative staffers, but especially all legislators, because right now it’s really hard to serve if you’re not independently wealthy, if you’re not have a wealthy partner, or from a wealthy background.

CHAKRABARTI: Two more quick questions, Amanda, before I have to let you go here. First of all does Run for Something recruit candidates from across the political spectrum?

LITMAN: So we work with values-aligned candidates who are running as Democrats or Independents or in non-partisan races but we work exclusively at the state and local level, as I mentioned.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay but you’re not actively seeking out young Republicans?

LITMAN: That’s for other people to tackle.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And one more thing, how successful have you been? How many candidates have you or young people have you convinced to run so far?

LITMAN: We’ve built the largest candidate pipeline in politics on either side of the aisle with about 280,000 people who’ve told us they wanna run, and we’ve helped elect just about 1,700 across 49 states, with another nearly 400 on the ballot this fall.

CHAKRABARTI: So Amanda Litman is co-founder and president of Run for Something. Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today.

LITMAN: Happy to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Professor Moyn, let me go back to you. Just your thoughts on what Layla Zaidane said a little bit earlier, also about that it’s expensive to actually live while in office, and maybe the pay doesn’t match.

MOYN: Well it’s so revealing that wealth is just an enormous input at every stage of our politics.

Who can run? Who can spend the time in their lives to serve? Who pays for the election? Who’s voting? And so we have to take a really careful look at that. But what is uplifting about what she says is that if we do get relatively younger people in office, they’re effective. And I would argue that although they have to answer to their constituents and popular opinion, they’re also likelier as younger people to think in more long-term ways just in the way that younger people on average do generally.

And so if we care about climate change or other long-term kinds of issues we can count on an injection of younger people into our political system that it could actually change our policy priorities.

CHAKRABARTI: I will say, though, that I completely understand that Run for Something, as Amanda says, they’ve, quote-unquote, “value-line aligned organization,” so they’re looking for candidates that lean left.

But as we saw in the last presidential election, I don’t know if it’s gonna, if it’s gonna still be true for the next presidential election. There are a lot of young people who are so disaffected with politics and disaffected with let me say quote-unquote, “woke politics” that they are, they either identify as conservative or identify as Republican. That’s an equally important cohort that has a vested interest in the health of America in the future. Does it not, Professor Moyn?

MOYN: Absolutely. It’s still the case that the older you are, the likelier are to be conservative.

And it’s certainly true that in the last presidential election, Donald Trump benefited from a youth, usually male vote on the right. But it’s still the case that the younger you are, the more liberal you’re likely to be to vote, to serve if you’re end up in office.

And so that’s something to keep in mind.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Moyn, let’s listen to several more of our very passionate listeners with their solutions for how to close divides between the generations. Here’s Karen in Virginia.

KAREN: Once my parents were able to, they started to fund scholarships at their public university that they attended, and as they were able to, they increased that amount.

Now that my mother is 98 years old, and that her wealth far exceeds her daily living expenses, I’ve been encouraging her to increase both the number of scholarships she provides as well as the dollar amount.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Kelly in Oregon.

KELLY: I’m a boomer. I started working in 1975, and with my one hour of minimum wage, I could buy four gallons of gas.

The minimum wage has been set at $7.25 since July of 2009. If it were adjusted for inflation, it’d be $11.32 now. I think that is one clear step that should be made.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and you also, you heard Karen earlier talking about giving more scholarships or trying to reduce the cost of education. That led to another huge swath of similar answers on solutions from our listeners, and here it is.

We have no mortgage, no credit card debt, no college loans for our children.

They had paid off their house. They had no student loan debt.

We have to do something about student loan debt.  

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Moyn, before we get to the sort of financial inequities and solutions to that, sticking with politics for a moment, we talked about elected officials and trying to get more young people into power.

What about voters? You dedicate a significant amount of your book talking about the power that elderly Americans have simply because they show up to vote more often. Are there both moral and legal corrections to that beyond getting young people somehow encouraging them to believe that their vote does count if they show up?

MOYN: Absolutely. We could start with mandatory voting, which many countries have. Yes. We’d have to decide if we make the penalty significant enough that it provides the right incentive. I think it’s even more important to recognize that we punish people’s mobility if they’re young by registration requirements that in effect favor older people.

And so we could lift those. We could give people time off from work, since older people are either retired or they have power in their jobs to go to the polls when younger workers may not. But, then there are some edgier proposals that I consider that involve thinking about what’s fair.

Is it fair that an older person who’s not going to see the results of the policies they’re voting in gets the same vote as someone who’s going to live for decades under the effects of the choices? So all of those things —

CHAKRABARTI: What do you mean by that, though? Let’s theorize.

What would be the solution to that?

MOYN: My thought is, the like we do have the unrepresented who are teenagers, and we could lower the voting age. But in the end, I think, what if we said, “Look, young people are gonna have to live five to six times as long, potentially under the policies chosen as a result of the next election.

So why not give them a vote that counts more?” And so that breaks with the sacrosanct principle hard-won in American life of one person, one vote. But maybe it’s a better way of thinking about how we can be equal citizens in this country.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s Samuel Moyn, not just touching the third rail, but you’re, like, wrapping your body around that.

But I like the edginess of it, ’cause we do have to think creatively here. But there are some, I just wanna go over once again the practical solutions that you said about mandatory voting or giving people a day off when they vote. I would say expanding vote by mail. There’s a lot of things that we can do to reach younger voters.

But in an earlier episode, one of the biggest barriers to getting young people to believe in the political system, it came up, and that is the information environment that they live in now with social media, the internet, et cetera, and all the messages that they’re getting that “It’s too late.

The system is broken. What I do or say won’t matter. I’m not part of this government.” They just feel completely emotionally disenfranchised. How can we fix that when those information pipelines are … they’re controlled by the big tech companies?

MOYN: I think it’s a huge problem.

I wanna be clear that the kinda wonkish solutions that we’ve both mentioned are not really facing the existential problem, which is the alienation of young people from a political system that doesn’t serve them and in a world of politicians who are so much older. And so that’s where I think older people who talk a lot these days about democracy need to begin showing a lot more empathy towards younger people and offer a kind of olive branch to say, “I’m not gonna shame you for not participating in the political system.

I’m gonna understand why you’re alienated and take some steps to involve you.”

CHAKRABARTI: And then maybe we can use those technocratic fixes to make sure that more, more young people vote than right now because it’s really a staggering thing. Yeah. Okay, let’s go back to our listeners, Professor Moyn.

This is Dylan in Utah. She says the solution for young people struggling right now is simple:

Just buck up.

DYLAN: What I’m hearing in this program is a whole lot of me, and perhaps due to my age, I find that a little disturbing. Obviously, we need to care about ourselves and our families, but we also need to care about the nation as a whole, and sometimes we need to take one on the chin for the greater good.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then as we now move into talking about ways to address the generational financial inequities, I do wanna make an important note that we do recognize absolutely in this country that there are a huge, perhaps even now the majority of seniors, who if they’re not just outright under the poverty line, they are feeling financially very precarious.

For example, here is Kobe in Oregon, who says he’s one of the estimated sixty percent of boomers who do not have enough money saved up to retire.

I’m seventy years old. I have no money. I work as a carpenter. I have arthritis everywhere. I will be working till I die because I have no money.

CHAKRABARTI: All right, so this is where we get to another place where I think there’s actually or should be very strong overlap between the majority of seniors and young people because there’s a solution that protects both the vulnerable elderly and millennials Gen Xers, millennials, and Gen Z who feel like making ends meet is also too hard.

And that solution, we’re gonna turn to Jonathan Heathcote for. He’s a monetary advisor in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and he says, “Look to the U.S. tax code.”

HEATHCOTE: I think when you think about it a little bit, it feels commonsensical, but it isn’t not the practice in the U.S. or in any other country really to have a tax system that depends on age.

The tax brackets and the marginal tax rates they depend on your income in the U.S., but there’s no age that factors into that calculation. But we’re not the first to point out that age is something that the, the IRS knows about you. IRS doesn’t know everything about you, and that’s part of the challenge of designing a tax system.

You’ve gotta tax people on, based on things that you can measure easily. But they do know how old everybody is, and so I don’t think it would be a completely infeasible to have a tax system that varied by age.

CHAKRABARTI: So here’s a fact about the U.S., obviously. Income inequality increases with age. And what I mean by that is if you look at, say, wealthy millennials and middle-class millennials, yes, there’s a certain gap there between people in the same age group.

But if you look at the sixty-five-plus age group in this country, the gap there between wealthy seniors and struggling seniors is the largest of any age cohort in the United States. And that intra-wealth intra-senior wealth gap is also the largest in the world. For example, for twenty-seven percent of its recipients, Social Security is their only income.

HEATHCOTE: If you think about people’s life cycles, when people start out, everyone is a little bit different already by the time they’re finishing high school and looking for their first jobs. But differences in income, differences in wealth tend to be relatively small at the start of the life cycle. And then through people’s careers, some people have spectacularly successful careers and end up promoted and ending up being the CEO of a company, or they start a business that does spectacularly well, and other people’s careers are much flatter.

And the result of that is that by the time people get to retirement age, there’s actually a lot more inequality in income and wealth at those older ages than there is at younger ages. And if you think about where the inequality is concentrated, if a lot of it is at older ages, then maybe there’s a case for having a more progressive tax system for older Americans and maybe a slightly less progressive one for people who are a bit younger.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, if you have been listening all week, you’ll remember in our episode about old money, we talked about this, that baby boomers as a whole cohort have seventy-seven trillion dollars in assets. But ten percent, the top ten percent of boomers control more than fifty-five trillion dollars of those assets.

That’s what we’re talking about, and that’s the crux of Heathcote’s idea. Imagine a world where taxation rates don’t just get higher by income bracket. They get even higher if you’re wealthy and older.

HEATHCOTE: There is a lot of inequality amongst the old and a system where the tax system was more progressive at older ages would tax the rich old and transfer to the poor old.

That would be a perhaps a welfare-improving policy.

CHAKRABARTI: Heathcote acknowledges that radical reform of the US tax code is a long and hard battle, but it’s better than the other ways that inequitable systems self-correct.

We’ve had the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed that, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Great Recession that followed that.

HEATHCOTE: It was a nasty recession, and there was a big surge in unemployment, and that was especially concentrated for younger workers, so younger people definitely took a big hit in the labor market. But a sort of silver lining from that recession was that stock prices fell really sharply and house prices fell sharply too.

2009 was a time when if you were a young household thinking about buying a house at that point, that was a time when it was relatively affordable to buy a house. And if you were starting to put money in your retirement account, that was definitely a good time to be buying stocks because those stocks have appreciated drastically since then.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Jonathan Heathcote, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Okay, Samuel Moyn, your thoughts. If we could get the political will to reform the tax code, would you like to put some sort of age and wealth progressivism in there?

MOYN: Absolutely. To begin with if you raise taxes, you’re indirectly affecting this age inequality that’s grown because the old are wealthier and the wealthier are older.

Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t poor older people. In fairness, the poverty rate of senior Americans is no greater than that of other adults and only half that of children. But what we have to recognize is that we could also begin to use age as a way of identifying who has financial privileges.

And the truth is that the tax code, not just at the federal level, but especially at the state and local level already has a lot of age-related policies, but they’re tax breaks for those who are old.

CHAKRABARTI: And give me some examples, yeah.

MOYN: The best examples concern property. And we provide many kinds of immunity or just tax breaks on homes and property generally based on age.

That’s above all true at the state level. But locally, many of the tax revolts of our gerontocratic age have been driven by older voters, and their main goal has been to make sure that those who have a home and have had it for a long time don’t have to pay fair tax on it. And the federal level really does need the kinds of reforms that Mr. Heathcote mentions.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I keep thinking Professor Moyn, you’ve been talking about how we should think in both just and fair terms about limits that we can put on the privileges of extreme wealth and age. But it’s also still very divisive because of the, I think, the poisoned nature of our politics today.

It’s almost impossible to have these conversations without some politician then turning to their elderly voters and say, “Look, they’re gonna take your hard-earned money away,” even if we’re talking about people who are, multimillionaires and multi-billionaires. There’s still always that pitting one generation against another.

And when it comes to wealth, I wonder if this is one place where maybe it’s actually best to just take age out of the conversation entirely and have intergenerational coalitions focus on making the tax code much more progressive for the wealthiest of Americans, regardless of how old they are.

MOYN: I think that’s very reasonable, Meghna. And if it turns out that’s the best way of dealing with it, as long as we understand what we’re doing, I think it’s fair to focus on just class disparity, even though they’re not just tracking age, but age contributes to the making of those inequalities in America today.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. There’s also some really practical things that were mentioned by our listeners, but we don’t have time to go into detail. But student loan debt relief, that ran into a political roadblock, even though the Biden administration tried it. Building more housing to bring costs down.

There’s so many structural things that we actually can be done, but this country’s having a hard time, I feel like, in a sense, we’ve lost our youthful political or civic vigor to just get bleep done, I think it’s saying something about the premature decrepitude of the American mindset.

If we don’t get past that, Professor Moyn, and you’re gonna get the last say here in the last minute, what might that cost us as Americans in the future?

MOYN: What you’re saying, Meghna, is that we’re suffering from collective senioritis.  And it’s tragic because the country really did represent not just youth, but progress to which everyone in the world once aspired and look up to.

But our political system is broken. Our parties compete for the same voters, but neither can break through because they’re not pursuing the kinds of majorities that would include enough younger people, who then as a result feel alienated from the system.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.