[Vision2020] Old vs. Young

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Sun Jun 24 05:48:21 PDT 2012


  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=93743b0d/888159f0&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787507c_nyt5&ad=BOSW_120x60_June13_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ewelcometothebathtub%2Ecom>

------------------------------
June 22, 2012
Old vs. Young By DAVID
LEONHARDT<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/david_leonhardt/index.html>

Washington

IN a partisan country locked in a polarizing campaign, there is no shortage
of much discussed divisions: religious and secular, the 99 percent and the
1 percent, red America and blue America.

But you can make a strong case that one dividing line has actually received
too little attention. It’s the line between young and old.

Draw it at the age of 65, 50 or 40. Wherever the line is, the people on
either side of it end up looking very different, both economically and
politically. The generation gap may not be a pop culture staple, as it was
in the 1960s, but it is probably wider than it has been at any time since
then.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, younger and older adults voted in largely
similar ways<http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html>,
with a majority of each supporting the winner in every presidential
election. Sometime around 2004, though, older voters began moving right,
while younger voters shifted left. This year, polls suggest that Mitt
Romney<http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney?inline=nyt-per>
will
win a landslide<http://www.gallup.com/poll/154712/presidential-election-age-factor-among-whites.aspx>among
the over-65 crowd and that President
Obama<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>will
do likewise among those under 40.

Beyond political parties, the two have different views on many of the
biggest questions before the country. The young not only favor gay marriage
and school funding more strongly; they are also notably less religious,
more positive toward immigrants, less hostile to Social
Security<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>cuts
and military cuts and more
optimistic<http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/02/24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/>about
the country’s future. They are both more open to change and more
confident that life in the United States will remain good.

Their optimism is especially striking in the context of their economic
troubles. Older Americans have obviously suffered in recent years, with
many now fearing a significantly diminished retirement. But the economic
slump of the last decade — a mediocre expansion, followed by a terrible
downturn — has still taken a much higher toll on the young. Less
established in their working lives, they have struggled to get hired and to
hold on to jobs.

The wealth gap between households headed by someone over 65 and those
headed by someone under 35 is wider than at any point since the Federal
Reserve Board began keeping consistent data in 1989. The gap in
homeownership is the largest since Census
Bureau<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/census_bureau/index.html?inline=nyt-org>data
began in 1982. The income gap is also at a recorded high; median
inflation-adjusted income for households headed by people between 25 and 34
has dropped 11 percent in the last decade while remaining essentially
unchanged for the 55-to-64 age group.

If there is a theme unifying these economic and political trends, in fact,
it is that the young are generally losing out to the old. On a different
subject, Warren E. Buffett, 81, has joked that there really is a class war
in this country — and that his class is winning it. He could say the same
about a generational war.

Younger adults are faring worse in the private sector and, in large part
because they have less political power, have a less generous safety net
beneath them. Older Americans vote at higher rates and are better
organized. There is no American Association of Non-Retired Persons. “Pell
grants,” notes the political scientist Kay Lehman
Schlozman<http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9685.html>,
“have never been called the third rail of American politics.”

Over all, more than 50 percent of federal benefits flow to the 13 percent
of the population over 65. Some of these benefits come from Social
Security, which many people pay for over the course of their working lives.
But a large chunk comes through
Medicare<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
and contrary to widespread perception, most Americans do not come
close<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/business/06leonhardt.html>to
paying for their own Medicare benefits through payroll taxes.
Medicare,
in addition to being the largest source of the country’s projected budget
deficits, is a transfer program from young to old.

Meanwhile, education spending — the area that the young say should be cut
the least, polls show — is taking deep cuts. The young also want the
government to take action to slow global
warming<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>;
Congress shows no signs of doing so. Even on same-sex
marriage<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
where public opinion is moving toward youthful opinion, all 31 states that
have held referendums on the matter have voted against same-sex marriage.

Over the long term, obviously, the young have a distinct advantage: they’re
not going away. So one of the central questions for the future of American
politics is whether today’s 20- and 30-year-olds will hold on to many of
the opinions they have today, a pattern that would be less surprising than
glib clichés about aging and conservatism suggest. Until recently, as the
presidential results from the 1970s through the 1990s make clear, Americans
did not grow much more conservative as they aged.

And while today’s young are not down-the-line liberal — they favor private
accounts for Social Security and have reservations about government actions
to protect online privacy — they certainly lean
left<http://www.newamerica.net/files/nafmigration/NSCZukinPublicOpinion.pdf>.


No one knows exactly why, but there are some suspects. Having grown up
surrounded by diversity, they are socially liberal, almost unconsciously
so. Many of them also came of age in the (ultimately unpopular) George W.
Bush presidency, or the (ultimately popular) Bill Clinton presidency, and
pollsters at the Pew Research
Center<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pew_research_center/index.html?inline=nyt-org>argue
that the president during a generation’s formative years casts a long
shadow, for better or worse. Hammered by the economic downturn, young
voters say they want government to play a significant role in the economy.

These attitudes create a challenge for the Republican Party that is
arguably as big as its better known struggles for the votes of Latinos.
“We’ve got a generation of young people who are more socially liberal and
more open to activist government,” says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew
center, which has done some of the most
extensive<http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/>generational
polling. “They are quite distinct.”

Shortly after Mr. Bush won re-election in 2004, just when the age gap was
emerging, his chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, wrote a memo to
other top Bush aides urging them not to assume that a new Republican
majority was emerging. The exit polls, he wrote to Karl Rove and others,
showed that younger voters had voted strongly Democratic, and those voters
would be in the electorate for a long time to come.

“They don’t think the Republican Party thinks like them,” much as older
voters feel alienated by what they see as today’s immigrant-embracing,
gay-friendly, activist-government Democratic Party, Mr. Dowd said last
week. “I don’t expect these younger voters to wake up all of a sudden when
they’re 38 years old and say, ‘I was for gay marriage before, but now I’m
against it.’ ”

Still, it would be mistake to assume that today’s young are going to be
Democrats for life. Many children of the 1960s, after all, grew up to be
Ronald Reagan voters. The political landscape shifts over time. Frustrated
by a weak economy and a government that disproportionately benefits the
old, younger adults could become ever more reluctant to send tax dollars to
Washington. The Republican Party could grow more libertarian and thus more
in line with the social views of the young.

What seems clear is that the marketing gurus are finally right: today’s
young really are different. They view a boisterously diverse United States
as a fact of life, and they view life as clearly better than it used to be.
But they are also products of the longest economic slump in 70 years, and
they would like a little help. They wish the country would devote more
attention to its future, especially on education and the climate. They, of
course, will have to live with that future.

David Leonhardt is the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120624/8fd20575/attachment.html>


More information about the Vision2020 mailing list