Outside Pittsburgh, a retired couple sitting around their dining-room table worries about whether Social Security will still be there in ten years. Their daughter and son-in-law, living across town, struggle with a different question: whether they will ever be able to buy a home, pay off their student loans, and raise two children without going bankrupt.

Their fears are real. They are normal responses to an economy and political system that increasingly forces generations to compete for financial security instead of building conditions in which they can thrive.

The United States faces a dangerous generational divide, not because older Americans are selfish or younger Americans are entitled, but because the political system increasingly lacks either the ability or the will to balance the needs of both. Programs for seniors remain politically protected while investments in younger generations are repeatedly delayed, diluted, or discarded altogether.

This political imbalance is creating more than fiscal strain. It is undermining the social contract itself.

A political system tilted toward seniors

The problem begins with demographics and political incentives. Older Americans vote more frequently than younger citizens. In the 2024 election, Census and CIRCLE, a non-partisan civic research center, showed turnout among Americans over 65 exceeded 70%, while turnout among voters under 30 lagged far behind.

Also, organizations representing retirees, most notably AARP, are among the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington, while younger Americans remain politically underrepresented. The result is predictable: preserving current benefits becomes politically sacred, while long-term investments in the future are treated as optional.

While Social Security and Medicare are enormously important programs—millions of seniors depend on them for survival—protecting seniors should not require systematically underinvesting in younger Americans.

Young people face housing costs that have vastly outpaced wages, staggering student debt burdens, delayed family formation, and declining rates of homeownership. Americans under 35 control only about 4% of the nation's wealth, while Americans over 70 control roughly 30%, according to Federal Reserve data. Childcare costs now rival mortgage payments in many metropolitan areas. Public universities increasingly shift costs onto students. Starter homes have become unaffordable in many regions.

Education policy clearly reveals the imbalance. Politicians routinely promise to defend retirement programs while investments in schools, universities, and research are treated as expendable. Federal spending on children has fallen substantially as a share of the federal budget over the past several decades, while state funding for public universities has steadily declined since the 1990s, shifting more of the burden onto students and families.

According to the Urban Institute, federal spending on children is projected to decline as a share of total federal spending in the coming years, even as spending on Social Security and Medicare continues to grow, suggesting a government increasingly consumed by the obligations of an aging society.

The upshot is an undermining of future opportunity. Weakening public education and reducing support for higher education does not merely hurt students; it undermines the country's long-term economic capacity and civic health.

The civic cost of generational politics

Another peril is democratic thinning: our institutions continue to function procedurally while losing their capacity to generate broadly shared legitimacy and long-term trust. Younger Americans increasingly believe the system is not designed for them. Older Americans fear the protections they earned may disappear. Each side grows more suspicious of the other, even though both are reacting to the same institutional dysfunction.

As NY Times columnist David French recently observed, many older Americans increasingly feel threatened in public life. In an era of "OK boomer" politics, some seniors encounter a hostile message: your generation created today's problems, you refuse to step aside, and the country would be better off without your influence.

The frustration behind these sentiments is understandable. Yet the blame is frequently misplaced.

The real problem is not older Americans. Nor is it younger Americans. The problem is a political system that has become increasingly adept at protecting commitments to older Americans while neglecting future investments that benefit the young. When institutions fail to balance the needs of different generations, citizens begin blaming one another for problems that originate in Washington. The result is precisely the kind of intergenerational resentment that healthy democracies must avoid.

Other countries have begun confronting these tensions more honestly than the United States. Some have expanded child benefits, subsidized housing construction, invested heavily in vocational education, or linked immigration policy directly to demographic needs. In America, by contrast, leaders often prefer symbolic cultural battles over difficult fiscal trade-offs.

Rebuilding the social contract

Eventually, however, reality prevails over political messaging.

The solution is not abandoning seniors. Nor is it blaming younger Americans for struggling in an economy increasingly stacked against them. The real challenge is rebuilding a political system capable of balancing obligations across generations instead of pitting them against one another.

That means strengthening Social Security's finances through serious reform, including lifting payroll tax caps and pursuing sustainable immigration policies. It means investing far more aggressively in affordable housing, childcare, education, workforce training, and infrastructure. It also means forcing Congress to think beyond the next election cycle and toward the long-term stability of society itself.

A healthy democracy does not merely preserve the present. It prepares for the future.

Right now, Washington is failing at both.

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Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.

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