A Modest Proposal

For Preventing the Children of the Working Population from Being a Burden Upon Their Parents or Country, and for Settling, in Full, the Liabilities of the Baby Boom.

I. The Problem

It is a melancholy thing to walk past a Whole Foods in any American city and observe a generation that owns the building, the parking lot, the supply chain, and the index fund that owns the bank financing each — explaining, between bites of avocado toast they did not pay for, that the next generation has no work ethic.

There are, at the time of this writing, approximately 69 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. They constitute roughly 20 percent of the population. They hold approximately 50 percent of the nation’s household wealth.¹ They are also the median voter in every election since 1986 and will remain so until approximately 2034.

This paper does not contest their right to hold what they have. It accepts, as the law requires, that property accumulated over a working life is property. It accepts that pensions are owed, that Social Security benefits are owed, that Medicare is owed. It accepts that the equity in their homes — homes purchased at a median price of three times their median annual income, and now valued at seven point four times the median annual income of their children² — is theirs to sell, bequeath, or borrow against.

What it does propose to settle is the question of where the difference is to come from.

II. The Accounting

The federal debt of the United States, when the median Boomer was born, stood at approximately 110 percent of GDP — the residual of the Second World War, paid down steadily over the subsequent two decades. When the median Boomer entered the labor force, it stood at 32 percent. It stands today at approximately 120 percent.³ The difference was not borrowed to win a war. It was borrowed to keep the Boomers’ assets liquid and rising.

The Federal Reserve has, since 1987, conducted monetary policy with one principal aim, never officially stated but consistently observed: the prevention of a sustained decline in the price of assets predominantly owned by retirees.⁴ The instruments of this policy — rate cuts during equity drawdowns, quantitative easing, the implicit guarantee of investment-grade credit — have a cumulative cost. That cost is paid in the form of debased currency, suppressed yields on savings, and asset prices that exclude the next cohort from ownership of the things their parents took for granted.

Social Security and Medicare, as currently structured, owe approximately $76 trillion in unfunded promises to current and future beneficiaries.⁵ The trust funds are projected to be exhausted within a decade. The shortfall is to be made up by the working population at the time of payment. The working population at the time of payment will be the children and grandchildren of the beneficiaries. They have not been asked.

Climate liabilities, by the most conservative estimates of the IPCC working group, will require capital expenditure on the order of $5 trillion per year through 2050 to limit warming to two degrees.⁶ The carbon was emitted, in greatest part, between 1965 and 2020. The bill will fall due between 2030 and 2080.

The AI capital expenditure cycle now underway — $650 billion in hyperscaler capex in 2026 alone, quadrupled since 2023⁷ — is funded by Boomer pension assets, Boomer-managed insurance reserves, and roughly $200 billion in private credit advanced against graphics processors that depreciate at 50 percent per year.⁸ The losses, when they arrive, will be socialized through the same mechanism that socialized the losses of 2008 and 2020. The gains, until then, accrue to the holders of equity.

These are not contested figures. They are pulled from the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Sightline Climate database. What is novel is the conclusion.

III. The Existing Proposals

Various solutions have been advanced. The Center has reviewed them.

It has been proposed that the working young be persuaded to have more children, so that future workers may pay the bill. The young, observing that they cannot afford housing for themselves, decline.

It has been proposed that productivity gains from artificial intelligence will close the gap. The productivity gains, if they materialize, will accrue to the holders of capital, who are the Boomers and their inheritors, deepening the original problem.

It has been proposed that the wealth be taxed and redistributed. This proposal commands majority support among voters under 50 and zero support among legislators over 65, who write the tax code. The legislators over 65 are also, in the aggregate, the wealthiest cohort in the legislative body. The Center notes this without comment.

It has been proposed that the young emigrate. This solution is functioning, but at a scale insufficient to relieve the underlying balance sheet, and the destination countries have begun to close their doors.

It has been proposed that the next major recession be permitted to clear the debt. The Federal Reserve has, in writing and in practice, indicated that it will not permit this.⁹

None of the existing proposals close the gap. The gap, in any politically realistic scenario, does not close.

IV. The Proposal

It is the considered view of the Center that the most equitable, expedient, and fiscally responsible course of action is to retire the Baby Boom into the food supply.

The Center wishes to be clear that this proposal is not advanced in cruelty, nor in retribution, but in arithmetic. The cohort in question is a holder of assets and a recipient of transfers. Its withdrawal from both sides of the ledger, in an orderly sequence, would discharge the unfunded liabilities of the federal government, release approximately $80 trillion of equity into the housing and equity markets,¹⁰ eliminate the bid for Medicare services that is the principal driver of healthcare cost inflation, and supply the protein needs of the residual population for approximately fourteen months at current consumption rates.

The Center recognizes that the proposal will require legislative authorization, infrastructure investment in collection and processing, and a public information campaign. It recommends that processing be conducted at decommissioned data center sites — of which, per the Center’s estimate, there will shortly be a great many¹¹ — and that the operation be financed through the issuance of zero-coupon bonds maturing in 2055, when the savings will be realized.

V. Anticipated Objections

The Center has anticipated several objections and addresses them here in turn.

The proposal is monstrous. The Center concedes that, on its face, the proposal is monstrous. It invites the reader to compare it, on the merits, to the existing arrangement, in which the same outcome is achieved over a longer time horizon — through the slow exclusion of the young from housing, family formation, savings, and retirement — without the consent of the excluded, and without any corresponding closure of the fiscal gap.

It violates the rights of the elderly. The Center notes that the existing arrangement violates the rights of the unborn, who have no vote and no voice in the obligations being booked in their name. The Center holds that one violation is not more grievous than the other and that the violations against the unborn are, additionally, larger in dollar terms.

The cohort earned what it has. The Center stipulates that the cohort worked for what it earned and does not propose otherwise. It observes only that the cohort earned in a labor market structured to favor it; bought houses in a housing market priced to favor it; invested in an equity market structured by a central bank to favor it; and now collects entitlements from a fiscal arrangement designed to favor it. The Center holds that work alone does not explain the accumulation and that the structural advantages, having no parallel in the experience of subsequent cohorts, must be settled.

It is illegal. The Center concedes this and notes that legality, in the United States, is established by the votes of legislators whose median age is 65 and whose median wealth is several times that of the population they represent. The Center submits that this is itself the problem under discussion.

It is a satire. The Center neither confirms nor denies.

VI. Benefits

The benefits of the proposal, as estimated by the Center’s modeling team, are as follows.

First, the federal debt is reduced by the discharge of approximately $76 trillion in entitlement obligations and the assumption, into the public balance sheet, of approximately $80 trillion in estate assets. Net improvement to the federal balance sheet: approximately $156 trillion, sufficient to retire the existing public debt twice over and finance a generation of climate and infrastructure investment.

Second, the median home price-to-income ratio returns to its 1985 level within eighteen months of the proposal’s enactment, restoring family formation to replacement levels and reversing a four-decade decline in birth rates.

Third, the Federal Reserve is relieved of its asset-price mandate and may pursue, for the first time since the Volcker era, a monetary policy oriented toward the productive economy.

Fourth, healthcare costs, dominated at present by end-of-life expenditure on the cohort in question, return to OECD norms within three years.

Fifth, the political composition of the legislature shifts to reflect, at last, the demographic composition of the country. Climate, housing, education, and labor policy may then be set by the cohorts who will live with the consequences.

Sixth, the protein supplied by the proposal, conservatively estimated at 4.2 million metric tons at average cohort body composition,¹² is sufficient to address food insecurity in the residual population for the duration of the transition.

VII. Conclusion

The Center is aware that the proposal will be received with horror. It anticipates condemnation in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the AARP Bulletin. It anticipates that the cohort in question will, through its disproportionate representation in the legislature, the judiciary, the financial press, and the executive boards of the country’s largest institutions, prevent the proposal’s enactment.

The Center submits that this is the proposal’s principal argument.

A cohort that can prevent its own balance-sheet settlement, but cannot fund its own promises, is the definition of a fiscal crisis. A polity that lacks the political mechanism to settle that balance sheet is the definition of a failed state in slow motion. The Center, which is not optimistic, expects the proposal to be ignored, the underlying problem to compound, and the eventual settlement to be involuntary, disordered, and considerably more painful for all concerned.

We propose, with regret, the orderly alternative.

— The Standing Committee on Cohort Liability
Center for Intergenerational Settlement
Washington, D.C.