This was a great post from Ezra last week on the fundamental political conflict facing the Republican Party these days:
Frum’s critique, put simply, is that demographics are destiny for political parties. A party made up of old people will have trouble cutting Medicare, and lo and behold, today’s Republican Party, despite believing Medicare the key cause of our budgetary troubles, is even more protective of its near-term spending than the Democrats. A party so reliant on elderly voters could hardly be otherwise…
The problem is that America’s demographics have no intention of holding true to their 50-year average. As Ed Kleinbard, a tax professor at USC, points out, the share of the country over 65 will increase by a third in the next 10 years alone. That means a greater share of the country depending on the government — and, worse even than that, a greater share depending on the government for expensive health-care services. The idea that we can support America in 2025 with the tax code America had in 1975 is foolishness.
But it’s foolishness that the Republican Party has yoked itself to, and that requires it to make heroically absurd policy assumptions. Even Ryan’s budget can’t credibly argue that Medicare and Social Security spending won’t grow as a percentage of the economy.[emphasis mine]
In the meantime, to make their numbers work in the face of changing demographics and rising health-care costs, they need to make genuinely draconian cuts to the programs that people who aren’t seniors rely on. That makes them even less popular party among the under-65 set, further exacerbating the fundamental tension of the modern GOP: That their core agenda is to turn back the spending patterns driven by the aging of the population, but their core constituency is the part of the population that’s aging and relies most on those programs.
Spot-on. I think the fact that people talk about taxes based on historical averages when our population is shifting ever further away from historical averages in the percentage of the elderly is a hugely important point. As our nation grows older, we need to raise more money in order to spend more on the elderly or massively cut from other parts of the economy in ways the American people are entirely unwilling to do. It’s all well and good to talk about taxes averaging 19% of GDP, or whatever, but we’re talking about averages over a period of time when the elderly were a much smaller portion of our population. And that matters. A lot. Of course, we could be a lot worse off, but our population is not growing older nearly as fast as most other Western Democracies. And why not? Those damn immigrants :-).
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