Entitlement reform is about to become a hot-button issue, again, due to imminent fiscal shortfalls.

And right now the politics don’t look great for Americans under 40. According to recent polling by the Cato Institute, 89% of senior citizens would support raising taxes on younger workers in order to maintain their Social Security benefits. Now consider that the median primary voter is 65 years old.

Gen Z votes at much lower rates than older Americans, especially in midterms. Worse, many Zoomers don’t even know how Social Security works. Half think their payroll taxes are either saved for them in a personal account or invested in a trust fund on their behalf.

In reality, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program. That means today’s beneficiaries are funded through taxes paid by younger workers, today. While retirees say they “paid in,” those dollars were spent long ago. Social Security’s mythology has obscured the economic trade-offs it requires: between the incomes of younger workers and the retirement lifestyles of seniors.

For decades, Social Security spending has gone in one direction: up, up, and up, on autopilot. As a result, it now accounts for over 22% of the federal budget, costing nearly $1.6 trillion per year. That makes it the single biggest item in America’s federal budget, and it’s not close. If you add up all spending on seniors in the federal budget, it’s about $2.7 trillion annually. We spend six times as much on senior citizens, the wealthiest demographic, as we do on children and young adults.

Congress has made no major changes to Social Security since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan signed a bipartisan bill that saved it from imminent collapse. Contrary to today’s facile notion that entitlement reform is “a third rail,” Reagan signed bipartisan legislation that cut Social Security and Medicare spending in 1983, in addition to raising taxes. He won 49 states the very next year (when the economy jumps 7% in a single year, they let you do it).

Since Reagan, no president has been able to change the course of Social Security. Bush and Obama both talked about it. Neither got it done.

Something must change. The Social Security Trust Fund (technically it’s the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund) is projected to run out in late 2032. That’s just six years from now. It means senators elected or re-elected in the November 2026 midterms will confront this crisis within their upcoming terms.

And that’s not the only crisis on the horizon. Medicare Hospital Insurance is projected to run out in 2033. Chinese President Xi Jinping has directed the Chinese military to be able to strike Taiwan by 2027, though this does not necessarily mean China will attack then. And the United States has been so occupied with transferring wealth to senior citizens that it forgot to match its defense production to its national security strategy. And that means significant production shortages of ships, missiles, and drones. America faces a rapidly complicated geopolitical situation, yet is maintaining historically low defense spending.

Making this all more intractable is America’s demographic collapse. We have fewer and fewer younger Americans supporting more and more older Americans. And this will get worse, impacting America’s ability to fund its entitlement programs — the fertility rate is falling faster than the Social Security Trustees seem to think.

This will all come to a head, and soon. The U.S. must either significantly cut the growth trajectory of Social Security and Medicare spending or dramatically raise taxes. (Or some combination of benefit cuts and tax hikes).

There is no way to finesse our way out of this. It’s far too late to “privatize” Social Security, and any such plan would dramatically raise the national debt, making America’s fiscal problem worse, not better. And while AI promises to accelerate economic growth, excessive government regulation, grassroots backlash, and early demands for Universal Basic Income all cast doubt on the notion that AI will save us from the consequences of our own government spending.

By law, when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out, the programs’ spending will be cut significantly (by over 20% for Social Security and over 10% for Medicare Part A). But Congress is unlikely to allow these cuts to happen, given the political realities we have discussed.

American senior citizens know what they want: retirement benefits that keep going up forever, paid for by younger workers. Meanwhile, younger people don’t even know their own interests. Or what threatens them. Even among Americans under 30, 47% would protect current retirees’ benefits even if that means higher taxes on younger workers like them.

Expect more of the same. At least until America’s fundamental imbalance, between elderly power and youthful ignorance, changes.

America did not begin as a gerontocracy. Thomas Jefferson was just 33 years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was around 20 in July 1776, but he was up north serving as a captain in a New York artillery company.

With respect to America’s founders, however, if taxation without genuine political representation was a problem back in 1776, it is a much larger problem now.

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Russ Greene is Executive Director of the Prime Mover Institute and the coiner of the term “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.”

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The Boomer Ponzi Scheme Robbing Americans Of Future Prosperity