Right around Christmas, the Pew Research Center released a study that could have provided kindling for a lively conversation at a holiday dinner. The official title is a little clunky (“The Big Generation Gap at the Polls Is Echoed in Attitudes on Budget Tradeoffs”), and I’m more partial to one of author Kim Parker’s pithier subheadings: “Old and Young Competing for Limited Federal Dollars.”
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That’s a succinct summation of one of the big themes of both the election campaign and the fiscal-cliff debate: The challenge of sustaining Social Security and Medicare without saddling younger Americans with either big benefit cuts, daunting tax increases, or both. Reducing that puzzle to an old-versus-young conflict is an oversimplification, of course – keeping the entitlement programs solvent will involve a wider range of reforms and sacrifices. But in a survey of about 2,500 voters, Parker and Pew ask questions that tease out some of the nuances—and contradictions—of the generational conflict.
First, the bad news (from the perspective of family dinner-table peace): Younger voters are significantly more likely than their elders to say that reducing the deficit is more important than protecting senior benefits – 41% of respondents between 18 and 29 feel that way, compared to 28% of those between 50 and 64. About 52% of the young millennials say that sustaining those benefits will put “too much of a financial burden” on younger Americans. And 54% say it’s “not likely” that there will be enough money to sustain those benefits into the future.
When younger voters are asked to consider how to fix the budget gap, however, the picture gets cloudier. Majorities of millennials support raising payroll taxes and cutting benefits for wealthier earners and seniors (their elders tend to agree with them on this). But only about a third of them support raising the eligibility age for Social Security; the numbers are about the same for Medicare.
In tying together these partly contradictory responses, the Pew survey throws out another interesting fact: “Young adults are more likely than middle-aged or older adults to say providing financial assistance to an elderly parent in need is a responsibility.” In fact, 84% of respondents aged 18 to 29 felt that way, compared to 67% of those under 65. Pew’s Parker doesn’t speculate about why this might be the case, but Michael Winerip of the New York Times thinks it may simply be a matter of younger voters having a clearer sense of obligation to the parents on whom they might still be relying for support today. “To a large degree, boomers are the parents and millennials are their children,” Winerip writes. “I know I’d give my life for my four, and almost as onerous, I’m paying for their college educations.”
