We need more tax revenue and we need the tax code to be more progressive. What we don't need is Sanders' billionaire tax fulminations, which is political theater.
You might be interested in the post I published yesterday to that effect. I compared wealth taxes to AOC's Met Gala "Tax the Rich" dress.
(Let me know if you don't want comments with links to relevant articles; I'm fine when others do it on my newsletter, but I'm happy to delete this if you have a different policy.)
A non-negligible chunk of that “social spending” is going to Trump-supporting Boomers who don’t need it and have long since decided “screw you [Millennials], I’ve got mine”.
I’m the least sympathetic to them that I’ve ever been.
Stereotyping and vilifying based on broad demographics is bigotry. If you stop that, you'll be a better human. For what it's worth, I'm a Boomer who always votes against Republicans and I work to be a contributor rather than a taker. I don't "have mine" and cross my fingers regarding financial survival every day.
Your response fills the equation out further. None of us like to have our struggles dismissed. Some of us who experience that respond by negatively characterizing and disliking a broad, diverse demographic category of people. That's bigotry.
To expand on Milan's stat, Mr. Muccigrosso, according to Pew, in 2024, voters 65+ (mostly Boomers) voted +3 for Trump. Voters 50-64 went for Trump +14. Useless old people (like me) were far closer to voters 30-49 (Trump -2) than we were to the generation that came after us. (And "generation" is misleading; in 2024 most Boomer kids were still under 50.)
I understand why younger people have such animus towards Boomers -- we were selfish in permitting ourselves to be born in such numbers. Historically, old people were sweet and few because they had the grace to die in childhood before collecting their pensions. It was our mistake. We're sorry. But every now and then we're not the ones who should be targets for all the awful things in the world.
When the guilty ones are Generation X, I forgive them. How would you behave if your predecessors were the victorious Sound of Armageddon and your successors the Coming of Paradise while you were named after an algebraic variable?
I've read many of your comments over the years, Mr. Muccigrosso, and I think you're more than sharp enough to figure this out yourself, without my having to kill my joke by explaining it. Just forget about the last two paragraphs.
You're targeting the wrong age cohort and it's sloppy thinking -- Boomers support Trump at roughly the same level as Millennials (and I know of no reason to think they're any more NIMBY than other homeowners past mid-life) -- it's actually unusual to have an oldest age cohort apparently more liberal than the next youngest, which is what the Pew figures suggest. Patrick Newby made the broader point. I thought perhaps a little humor might make it easier for you to recognize it but your response to Mr. Newby suggests you're not in the mood.
If it's any comfort, I agree with the idea implicit in your comment that Social Security should be means-limited.
Bob, by your own numbers, Boomers are still on net pro-Trump, and I’d bet that if we looked back at 2016 and 2020, we’d find even higher Boomer support than 2024.
To be clear, I’m not trying to erase your and other liberal Boomers’ contributions. But I also live in a town run by them, and the “screw you, I’ve got mine, why don’t you go buy a house an hour down the road because WE’RE FULL here” attitude is plenty rampant! Indeed, I apologize if I was being confusing by mentioning both points in the same sentence, but I was NOT trying to restrict my condemnation of that NIMBYism to ONLY Trump-supporting Boomers.
Moreover, your point about NIMBYism corresponding to homeownership ignores that Millennials and Zoomers have been *locked out* of homeownership by NIMBY! Even if NIMBYism is independent of age, it has been MADE dependent on age by its own success. Also, aside from strict demographic stats and opinion polls, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that Boomers are the ones who erected the whole NIMBY state — it certainly wasn’t Millennials who were the single largest voting bloc from the 70’s-90’s!
Sometimes relying on statistics alone to prove anything, gives us a convenient excuse to ignore trends staring us right in the face.
Good. I'm glad to see the substantive type of reply I expect from you, David.
On stats alone: Yes, you'd find higher 65+ Trump votes in 2016 and 2020, but this is because 65+ is becoming increasingly Boomer dominated as time goes by.
On NIMBYism, I'm in a town and county politically dominated by Gen X liberals and it is incredibly hard to get things built to ease a critical housing shortage. It's more comfortable to oppose capitalistic Developers as a liberal cover to "spoiling" established neighborhoods. Believe me, I understand the impulse -- I own my home -- but pretending NIMBY behavior is principled in today's world is just bad faith.
Boomers erected the NIMBY state (to accept your generalization -- we had plenty of help from our immediate elders) because in the context of the 1970s unregulated development *was* the critical target to control. Boomers grew up in a pre-EPA world and things look different when you live in that framework. Contexts change, and that's a really difficult lesson to learn because it involves unlearning lessons that used to be near-sacred.
Unfortunately, although it’s not new for political movements to have terrible unintended consequences, the reaction to pollution and sprawl has had a pretty nasty long tail.
RE the original point, means-testing social security and Medicare is a no-brainer, but I think we also need to rethink just how distortive those policies are in the first place.
The whole idea of aging gracefully in place sounds superficially nice, but masks the fact that the transition from multigenerational households to the nuclear family has been a disaster all around. Financial pressures on seniors before the welfare state were brutal, but they also drove rational market decision-making about how best to use limited family resources, which in turn gave us a better matching of housing needs to the available housing stock.
I think it would have been better all around if we had focused on how to preserve our elders’ dignity and keep multigenerational households together even as we grew in prosperity to not necessarily be *forced* to live that way. That in turn probably would have required focusing the apex of family wealth and resources on those in their middle decades of life — 30’s, 40’s, and into their 50’s — instead of backloading them as heavily as we did. Sprawl was a mistake. We should have kept our dense, walkable urbanism in most places. We should have preserved all the different price points on the housing ladder.
I’d like a system where senior benefits were dramatically pared down for those with options to live with family — with the implication being a more lively, well-matched, and thriving housing market so that family members in their primes could easily afford to bump up or down to an extra room for grandma. Or perhaps, instead of paring down the benefits, to simply offer significantly better benefits that would go straight to the family caretaker! And on the flip side, a robust safety net so that we don’t end up with the same brutal outcomes as before, for those who fell through the cracks.
In the meantime, though, that’s a LONG and drawn out discussion, which is why I opened this thread where I did. In terms of Jerusalem’s top level point, I think Dems should really stop obsessing about protecting a welfare state that is not really doing the party any favors anymore. It’s one thing to capitalize on GOP policy mistakes and cruelty; it’s another to make ourselves avatars of a failing gerontocracy in the eyes of two successive generations (Millennials and Zoomers) who dominate in the electorate and increasingly see that gerontocracy as antagonistic to them. We as a party have a terrible habit of leaping to defend genuinely sympathetic causes and then imagining that we must ALSO make full-throated, take-no-prisoners defenses of the LEAST sympathetic aspects of those causes. This is one of those cases. We should not mindlessly conflate “preventing elder cruelty is popular” with “the gerontocracy is popular”.
Are there Democratic governors or any elected at the Federal level attempting their own more productive version of DOGE? Democrats calling out waste (other than the DOD) would seem to an effective campaign technique. Unfortunately Dem Mayors and Governors still seem to view government as a jobs program regardless of unemployment rate.
The issue is that Dems call out government waste all the time. Every time a Republican puts up a plan to reduce government waste - no matter how goofy or ill-conceived - there are Dems who vocally support. Examples: Sanders, Khanna, Moskowitz, Schumer, Fetterman, and Hickenlooper all said, in the aftermath of DOGE's creation, some form of "we need to cut government waste, but DOGE isn't the right way to do it."
The problem is just that, as a party, the Dems don't stand for anything in particular, so that information isn't really useful. The way Khanna approaches government waste is very, very different than how Fetterman approaches government waste. Knowing that they share both membership in the same political party, as well as a desire to reduce government waste, tells us nothing useful about either of them, which is why no one cares or remembers when they announce their "support to reduce government waste."
> Homeowners who checked their Zestimates during the COVID-19 years may have been delighted to find their homes had appreciated in value without any work on their parts, but with great wealth comes great taxation. When property tax bills came due in 2023, local governments collected $363.3 billion in property taxes on single-family homes, the largest increase in the preceding five years.
Your source for this states otherwise:
>Effective rates increased last year throughout much of the U.S. amid a combination of declining home values and rising tax bills. Nationwide, the average home value dipped 1.7 percent as the nation’s decade-long housing market boom cooled off in 2023, especially in the second half of the year when median home-sale prices declined. The decrease in values, along with rising taxes, resulted in a small increase in effective rates. ... “The tax increases were likely connected, at least in part, to inflationary pressures on the cost of operating local governments and schools, along with rising public employee wages and other major expenses.”
So *lower* property values led to increase in tax rate (as a percent of property value) and increased costs led to the total higher tax bill. Increased property value doesn't really impact this since (A) property isn't reassessed every year, (B) everyone gets reassessed at the same time and (C) the town budget is spread across the whole town proportional to property value. At least, that's how it works in my area.
We need more tax revenue and we need the tax code to be more progressive. What we don't need is Sanders' billionaire tax fulminations, which is political theater.
You might be interested in the post I published yesterday to that effect. I compared wealth taxes to AOC's Met Gala "Tax the Rich" dress.
https://www.davidnroberts.com/p/taxes-inequality-envy
(Let me know if you don't want comments with links to relevant articles; I'm fine when others do it on my newsletter, but I'm happy to delete this if you have a different policy.)
“We need more tax revenue and we need the tax code to be more progressive. “
Western Europeans fund their welfare states on more regressive tax codes with much higher taxation levels on the middle class and including VAT.
Chris Van Hollen has lost the plot! Such a terrible idea he is floating.
Thank you thank you thank you for writing this article.
A non-negligible chunk of that “social spending” is going to Trump-supporting Boomers who don’t need it and have long since decided “screw you [Millennials], I’ve got mine”.
I’m the least sympathetic to them that I’ve ever been.
These days 65+ voters are ~50/50 D-R
Per the comments below, Boomers voted for Trump.
They also spent their entire lives installing the NIMBY state.
Stereotyping and vilifying based on broad demographics is bigotry. If you stop that, you'll be a better human. For what it's worth, I'm a Boomer who always votes against Republicans and I work to be a contributor rather than a taker. I don't "have mine" and cross my fingers regarding financial survival every day.
>> Stereotyping and vilifying based on broad demographics is bigotry. If you stop that, you'll be a better human.
Funny, all my life I’ve been told that I eat too much avocado toast and should just work harder to afford a fucking house where my job is.
But, no, *I’m* the one doing bigoted stereotypes. OK.
Your response fills the equation out further. None of us like to have our struggles dismissed. Some of us who experience that respond by negatively characterizing and disliking a broad, diverse demographic category of people. That's bigotry.
You ate avocado toast as a baby? What was your parents’ secret? Or was this all you?
To expand on Milan's stat, Mr. Muccigrosso, according to Pew, in 2024, voters 65+ (mostly Boomers) voted +3 for Trump. Voters 50-64 went for Trump +14. Useless old people (like me) were far closer to voters 30-49 (Trump -2) than we were to the generation that came after us. (And "generation" is misleading; in 2024 most Boomer kids were still under 50.)
I understand why younger people have such animus towards Boomers -- we were selfish in permitting ourselves to be born in such numbers. Historically, old people were sweet and few because they had the grace to die in childhood before collecting their pensions. It was our mistake. We're sorry. But every now and then we're not the ones who should be targets for all the awful things in the world.
When the guilty ones are Generation X, I forgive them. How would you behave if your predecessors were the victorious Sound of Armageddon and your successors the Coming of Paradise while you were named after an algebraic variable?
Can you please distill this to an actual point?
I've read many of your comments over the years, Mr. Muccigrosso, and I think you're more than sharp enough to figure this out yourself, without my having to kill my joke by explaining it. Just forget about the last two paragraphs.
You're targeting the wrong age cohort and it's sloppy thinking -- Boomers support Trump at roughly the same level as Millennials (and I know of no reason to think they're any more NIMBY than other homeowners past mid-life) -- it's actually unusual to have an oldest age cohort apparently more liberal than the next youngest, which is what the Pew figures suggest. Patrick Newby made the broader point. I thought perhaps a little humor might make it easier for you to recognize it but your response to Mr. Newby suggests you're not in the mood.
If it's any comfort, I agree with the idea implicit in your comment that Social Security should be means-limited.
Bob, by your own numbers, Boomers are still on net pro-Trump, and I’d bet that if we looked back at 2016 and 2020, we’d find even higher Boomer support than 2024.
To be clear, I’m not trying to erase your and other liberal Boomers’ contributions. But I also live in a town run by them, and the “screw you, I’ve got mine, why don’t you go buy a house an hour down the road because WE’RE FULL here” attitude is plenty rampant! Indeed, I apologize if I was being confusing by mentioning both points in the same sentence, but I was NOT trying to restrict my condemnation of that NIMBYism to ONLY Trump-supporting Boomers.
Moreover, your point about NIMBYism corresponding to homeownership ignores that Millennials and Zoomers have been *locked out* of homeownership by NIMBY! Even if NIMBYism is independent of age, it has been MADE dependent on age by its own success. Also, aside from strict demographic stats and opinion polls, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that Boomers are the ones who erected the whole NIMBY state — it certainly wasn’t Millennials who were the single largest voting bloc from the 70’s-90’s!
Sometimes relying on statistics alone to prove anything, gives us a convenient excuse to ignore trends staring us right in the face.
Good. I'm glad to see the substantive type of reply I expect from you, David.
On stats alone: Yes, you'd find higher 65+ Trump votes in 2016 and 2020, but this is because 65+ is becoming increasingly Boomer dominated as time goes by.
On NIMBYism, I'm in a town and county politically dominated by Gen X liberals and it is incredibly hard to get things built to ease a critical housing shortage. It's more comfortable to oppose capitalistic Developers as a liberal cover to "spoiling" established neighborhoods. Believe me, I understand the impulse -- I own my home -- but pretending NIMBY behavior is principled in today's world is just bad faith.
Boomers erected the NIMBY state (to accept your generalization -- we had plenty of help from our immediate elders) because in the context of the 1970s unregulated development *was* the critical target to control. Boomers grew up in a pre-EPA world and things look different when you live in that framework. Contexts change, and that's a really difficult lesson to learn because it involves unlearning lessons that used to be near-sacred.
Unfortunately, although it’s not new for political movements to have terrible unintended consequences, the reaction to pollution and sprawl has had a pretty nasty long tail.
RE the original point, means-testing social security and Medicare is a no-brainer, but I think we also need to rethink just how distortive those policies are in the first place.
The whole idea of aging gracefully in place sounds superficially nice, but masks the fact that the transition from multigenerational households to the nuclear family has been a disaster all around. Financial pressures on seniors before the welfare state were brutal, but they also drove rational market decision-making about how best to use limited family resources, which in turn gave us a better matching of housing needs to the available housing stock.
I think it would have been better all around if we had focused on how to preserve our elders’ dignity and keep multigenerational households together even as we grew in prosperity to not necessarily be *forced* to live that way. That in turn probably would have required focusing the apex of family wealth and resources on those in their middle decades of life — 30’s, 40’s, and into their 50’s — instead of backloading them as heavily as we did. Sprawl was a mistake. We should have kept our dense, walkable urbanism in most places. We should have preserved all the different price points on the housing ladder.
I’d like a system where senior benefits were dramatically pared down for those with options to live with family — with the implication being a more lively, well-matched, and thriving housing market so that family members in their primes could easily afford to bump up or down to an extra room for grandma. Or perhaps, instead of paring down the benefits, to simply offer significantly better benefits that would go straight to the family caretaker! And on the flip side, a robust safety net so that we don’t end up with the same brutal outcomes as before, for those who fell through the cracks.
In the meantime, though, that’s a LONG and drawn out discussion, which is why I opened this thread where I did. In terms of Jerusalem’s top level point, I think Dems should really stop obsessing about protecting a welfare state that is not really doing the party any favors anymore. It’s one thing to capitalize on GOP policy mistakes and cruelty; it’s another to make ourselves avatars of a failing gerontocracy in the eyes of two successive generations (Millennials and Zoomers) who dominate in the electorate and increasingly see that gerontocracy as antagonistic to them. We as a party have a terrible habit of leaping to defend genuinely sympathetic causes and then imagining that we must ALSO make full-throated, take-no-prisoners defenses of the LEAST sympathetic aspects of those causes. This is one of those cases. We should not mindlessly conflate “preventing elder cruelty is popular” with “the gerontocracy is popular”.
Are there Democratic governors or any elected at the Federal level attempting their own more productive version of DOGE? Democrats calling out waste (other than the DOD) would seem to an effective campaign technique. Unfortunately Dem Mayors and Governors still seem to view government as a jobs program regardless of unemployment rate.
Mamdani
The issue is that Dems call out government waste all the time. Every time a Republican puts up a plan to reduce government waste - no matter how goofy or ill-conceived - there are Dems who vocally support. Examples: Sanders, Khanna, Moskowitz, Schumer, Fetterman, and Hickenlooper all said, in the aftermath of DOGE's creation, some form of "we need to cut government waste, but DOGE isn't the right way to do it."
The problem is just that, as a party, the Dems don't stand for anything in particular, so that information isn't really useful. The way Khanna approaches government waste is very, very different than how Fetterman approaches government waste. Knowing that they share both membership in the same political party, as well as a desire to reduce government waste, tells us nothing useful about either of them, which is why no one cares or remembers when they announce their "support to reduce government waste."
> Homeowners who checked their Zestimates during the COVID-19 years may have been delighted to find their homes had appreciated in value without any work on their parts, but with great wealth comes great taxation. When property tax bills came due in 2023, local governments collected $363.3 billion in property taxes on single-family homes, the largest increase in the preceding five years.
Your source for this states otherwise:
>Effective rates increased last year throughout much of the U.S. amid a combination of declining home values and rising tax bills. Nationwide, the average home value dipped 1.7 percent as the nation’s decade-long housing market boom cooled off in 2023, especially in the second half of the year when median home-sale prices declined. The decrease in values, along with rising taxes, resulted in a small increase in effective rates. ... “The tax increases were likely connected, at least in part, to inflationary pressures on the cost of operating local governments and schools, along with rising public employee wages and other major expenses.”
So *lower* property values led to increase in tax rate (as a percent of property value) and increased costs led to the total higher tax bill. Increased property value doesn't really impact this since (A) property isn't reassessed every year, (B) everyone gets reassessed at the same time and (C) the town budget is spread across the whole town proportional to property value. At least, that's how it works in my area.