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.
