Millennials Deserve Their Social Security (and Need to Say So)

Millennials, which is the generation that I (and most of my friends, including my younger brother) am a member of, have gotten one of the roughest sets of economic cards of any American generation since the Greatest Generation (who were dealt a decade-long depression sandwiched between two world wars that killed many of their brethren).  Our outlook took a different approach, including a gigantic recession in 2008 as we entered the work force combined with a housing crisis coupled with crippling student loan debt that has not remotely kept up with inflation, and a global pandemic that hit us with a second round of layoffs & delayed paychecks as we were entering our peak earning years...Millennials, who are now beginning to turn 40 have gotten the roughest end of the economic bargain (Gen Z hasn't gotten it much better, but they have youth on their side in terms of long-term financial gains & a change in direction).

This has shaped an attitude amongst Millennials that is quite cynical, frequently to the point of defeatism & sometimes hurting their own cause.  Ask any Millennial, and they'll talk about student loans as a lifelong obligation, home ownership as a pipe dream, and retirement saving as pointless.  Part of this is borne of reality (as I said above, they were dealt an impossible set of cards) and part of it (I'm sorry, but it's reality) is a result of being far too cynical, and assuming that the worst will always come.  Why save for tomorrow when climate change/Covid/nuclear war/insert-your-own-catastrophe will kill us all anyway?

Millennials are also, it's worth noting, amongst the most progressive and charitable of generations (yes, Boomers, Millennials give far more to charity than most previous generations, including yourselves, despite being given once-in-a-century economic handicaps).  They are the most highly-educated generation in American history, and are civically-engaged.  They have not yet, however, taken on the most valuable asset that they have at their disposal, and that's going to become crucial in the coming years: that as of 2020, they have overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest generation, and given that even the youngest of Millennials are now of voting age, that means that they are now the largest voting bloc in the United States.

Where am I going with this?  I'll tell you, but we're going to have to pivot for a second so hang on with me and I promise we're getting somewhere.  Over the past few weeks, but especially since the State of the Union, the Republican Party has been dealing with an internal crisis around Social Security & Medicare.  President Biden during the State of the Union accused Republicans of proposing cuts to Social Security & Medicare, which resulted in heckling by members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.  This is fascinating because, well, Biden was right.  There are Republicans, to be sure, who have been publicly on record as not wanting to cut Social Security & Medicare, most notably former President Donald Trump (easily the most populist stance he took, and one of the primary reasons he resonated so well with white working class voters who had gone for Obama in 2008 & 2012) and to a lesser degree, Sen. Mitch McConnell.  But Republicans, including major GOP leaders like Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, John Thune, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, & even supposed "moderate" Mitt Romney have talked about curbing Social Security & Medicare benefits, as well as privatizing it in a way that would almost certainly put Social Security benefits at risk in the future.

What's notable as they kick off presidential debates, is the way that Nikki Haley & Mike Pence are going after entitlement benefits, and to some degree are trying to claim what they're proposing is not a "cut."  Their proposal seems to be focused on not impacting current recipients of Social Security & Medicare (those benefits stay), but instead cutting benefits for future generations (without saying it, they mean Millennials & Gen Z), raising the age when you could qualify to as much as 70.

There are ways to make Social Security solvent other than cutting benefits or raising the age.  The biggest and easiest one would be to eliminate the Social Security payroll cap, which currently stands at $147,000 a year; essentially the money you make after that is not taxed for Social Security   This would, in fact, add literal decades of time onto the Social Security solvency issue, some estimate as much as 35 years, during which time public reforms on retirement saving, health insurance, & easier access to public housing could alleviate some of the pressure on Social Security & Medicare as a public good.  But Republicans aren't exploring that-what they're proposing is basically screwing over Millennials & Gen Z to avoid having to raise taxes on the rich.

Millennials I talk to anecdotally assume this is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't, and here's why: there is increasing unwillingness among Democrats to consider this as an option.  Chuck Schumer is against raising the Social Security age, and Joe Biden has said he'll veto any proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age.  As a result, the Democrats seem to be increasingly aligned that raising the Social Security age is not an option.  This is new-Democrats have been more open in previous years to the idea that with life expectancy going up, entitlement eligibility should go up with it.  What Millennials need to do now is draw a hard line in the sand that this is unacceptable, and that starts with us referring to this as a cut.  For all of the "foregone conclusion" talk, we pay Social Security & Medicare taxes every single paycheck that go into a system that guarantees us access to Social Security at age 62 and Medicare at age 65.  ANY changes that increases the age to that should be called what it is-a cut to our Social Security & Medicare benefits.

So, I am begging my fellow Millennials-we need to stick together on this one.  We already started our economic journeys on the backs of a Boomer-led recession and a Boomer-elected Trump screwing up our futures further by botching the Covid pandemic response.  But if we allow our cynicism & assumption that we can only get dealt a bad hand to not call out Nikki Haley & Mike Pence as totally unacceptable (and show Democrats we mean business that this is not an option for us), that it's an unforgivable act for them to raise the Social Security & Medicare ages, that's on us.  We have earned this right-some Millennials, having worked since high school, have paid into social security for over twenty years.  Excuse my language, but we have fucking earned the right to have our Social Security at the exact same age our parents did.  It's time we made sure we tell Washington that we, too, can vote with our wallets like our parents have for decades.