Greatest Generation or Greedy Geezers? Social Spending Preferences and the Elderly

Abstract

Some researchers, policy makers, and media accounts have challenged the equity of U.S. age-based social spending, invoking concerns about generational equity. The generational equity position, as expressed in the U.S. political landscape, attributes Social Security and Medicare's relative political invulnerability to elderly Americans' willingness to support spending on themselves, to the exclusion of spending on others. We use data from the General Social Survey to examine whether the preferences for increased education, health, and Social Security spending expressed by citizens of various age groups are consistent with age-based self-interest. Our findings indicate that arguments for generational spending preferences based exclusively on age are overly simplistic. A greater percentage of elderly citizens favor increased education spending compared to increased Social Security spending, while younger Americans express higher levels of support for increased Social Security spending than do elderly citizens. We find little empirical support for the negative connotations of generational equity as it applies to support for U.S. social spending.

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