America is getting old.

Between 1960 and 2024, the share of Americans over 65 doubled — from 9 percent to 18 percent. And the US will only grow grayer in the coming years. Within a decade, America’s seniors will outnumber its children for the first time in history, according to Census Bureau projections. By 2060, those over 65 are expected to comprise about one quarter of the population.

This demographic transition will be a defining fact of the 21st century, shaping nearly every part of American life. But its political implications are liable to be especially profound — and immediate: Seniors already accounted for 29 percent of the US electorate in 2024.

Older voters have always exerted disproportionate political influence, due to their exceptionally high turnout rates. Historically, however, seniors’ power was limited by their small share of the population. Now, that constraint is steadily loosening.

This could be a problem for America’s rising generations. US public policy has long disfavored the young. By international standards, our welfare state offers meager support to families with children, even as it provides robust benefits for retirees. And the latter programs are likely to consume an ever-larger share of the federal budget in the coming decades, a shift that could burden younger Americans with higher tax rates or borrowing costs, while crowding out new spending on their needs. Our nation’s housing policies, meanwhile, privilege (disproportionately older) homeowners over renters.

Seniors’ growing electoral clout could deepen these imbalances. And there are signs it already has. As the electorate has aged over the last few years, economic policy has grown even more tilted against the young.

This drift towards gerontocracy — government of, by, and for the old — doesn’t just undermine the interests of millennials or zoomers. It also threatens the prosperity of America as a whole.

State governments are soaking the young

In states across the country, governments have recently shifted tax burdens away from older generations and toward younger ones.

In some cases, this elder bias is explicit and intentional. Since 2022, Texas, Colorado, Iowa, and Pennsylvania have all slashed property taxes specifically for homeowners 65 or older. At the same time, a slew of states have begun exempting retirement income from taxation. Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and West Virginia ended taxes on Social Security benefits, while Iowa abolished the taxation of all forms of retirement income — from 401(k) withdrawals to pension benefits — for residents over 55.

The principal function of these measures is not to rescue cash-strapped seniors from poverty. Federal rules already shield indigent retirees from income taxes. Broad exemptions deliver the bulk of their benefits to the affluent. An analysis of Illinois’s long-standing tax breaks on retirement income found that households earning over $175,000 collected 60 percent of the benefits. Research into the distributional implications of other states’ exemptions has yielded similar findings.

And tax policies that explicitly favor the old are only part of the story. There has also been a broader turn against property taxes on all existing homeowners — a shift that tends to benefit affluent seniors at younger families’........

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