Is There a Boomer–Zoomer War?

T here’s been much ado online about burritos costing $20 today and starter homes costing a couple of raspberries in 1975, a microcosm of a larger brewing intergenerational conflict that in some ways explains the groundswell of support for Democratic socialism among America’s disaffected youth. Young people and especially Zoomers, voters age 18 to 29, feel they’ve inherited an expensive world in which certain milestones, such as home ownership, have been foreclosed to them partially because the Baby Boomers are hoarding possessions and power well into their sunset years.

A viral moment on this topic came from Ross Douthat’s recent interview with Yale professor Samuel Moyn, who argued provocatively that because old people have outsized wealth and influence in modern society, voting-age young adults should be awarded proxy votes in elections for the “unrepresented children of our country.” The exchange unleashed a torrent of conservative outcry on X, specifically at the statist idea that strangers appointed by the government are better custodians of that child’s interests and welfare than their parents are.

But many of the critics missed the bigger conversation about America’s gerontocracy.

Politically and financially, it is the Baby Boomers’ world. Political posts still generally favor incumbency, which means older veteran candidates see no reason not to run repeatedly for decades to retain their seats. Aging politicians refusing to go gently into that good night have become a fixture of our government, between Mitch McConnell’s mysterious recent hospitalization and former President Joe Biden’s frailty scandal. In 2025, Representative Gerry Connolly (D., Va.) died at 75, making him the third Democratic member of Congress to die in office that year.

The question of “whom does the government really serve?” becomes harder to answer when the median age of voting members is 57.5 years in the House and 64.7 years in the Senate. Of course, there are positive aspects to old age in politics. With age often comes wisdom and resistance to political fads, such as socialism, which it turns out isn’t actually groundbreaking at all but quite tired and recycled. Older generations who witnessed the horrors and failures of communism provide crucial testimony to young voters who think they’ve got it all figured out.

But young people don’t believe that the status quo is setting them up for success. Rather, they believe it’s further cushioning the Boomers’ retirement. The American welfare state disproportionately benefits older people, between Medicare and Social Security. These programs are now politically untouchable to Republican and Democratic candidates alike if they want to get elected, given that older people make up most of voting turnout. The average general-election voter is 52, and the average primary-election voter is 59.

Young people eagerly anticipate the biggest wealth transfer in history, when nearly $124 trillion in assets will pass from older generations to Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, and charities through 2048. The problem is that this succession doesn’t feel like it’s coming anytime soon.

As Moyn told Douthat, “Millennials will do fine, but they’re in a waiting game to come into the resources.”

Anecdotally, I have a relative in his 20s who is trying to break into a career in real estate acquisition and development, buying up diamonds in the rough, fixing them, and selling them for a markup or renting them. Discouraged by the highly inflated housing market, he spends much of his time combing through deeds and property tax records to see if anyone might be willing to sell him their home directly, at a discount from the appraisal value. Routinely, he has run into owners, usually elderly, who simply have no interest in selling the house even if they don’t have children to bequeath it to. The existing incentive structure gives no impetus to do so.

Many young people have resigned themselves to the fact that they’ll be renters until they’re approaching 40, or they’ll just continue to hope for prices to fall from the historic high that insufficient supply and the Federal Reserve’s long-term monetary manipulation have wrought.

Of course, it is wrong to scapegoat an entire generation that was mainly just in the right place at the right time. The New Deal’s expansive security blanket was created in response to the most severe financial and economic crisis in American history. Once it got rolling, it proved difficult to put that genie back in the bottle. There was also this little hiccup called World War II, then the Korean War, then the Vietnam War, mixed in with stagflation and oil shocks during the Jimmy Carter administration in the 1970s and other turbulence along the way. One could certainly argue that the Boomers deserve to enjoy the benefits they’ve reaped and longevity of life thanks to today’s advanced medicine.

On housing, the government has for years aggressively intervened without any foresight about how it would affect future generations. Since FDR’s presidency and after the 2008 housing bubble collapse, the government’s footprint in the mortgage market has dramatically expanded. In conjunction with the Fed’s long era of easy money, that artificially stimulated demand for housing without doing anything to address supply, resulting in much higher prices for members of Gen Z to confront as they come of age.

But the flip side of that is that Boomers are sometimes opposed to housing construction, the very thing that could theoretically restore more normal prices. There is the phenomenon of NIMBYism, by which urban Boomer homeowners, to combat “density,” block construction of more housing in neighborhoods that would be desirable to younger generations. Ironically, some of the worst cases of this are in deep-blue cities like San Francisco, where progressive voters talk about helping the marginalized but then in practice price out the working and middle class.

To reset the playing field for younger people, Moyn, an academic on the left, prescribed more representation for them in government, institutions, and voting weight. He even proposed expanding entitlements for the elderly, in addition to everyone else. Although when pressed by Douthat on how to pay for that, he conceded that taxing entrepreneurs would seem to undercut the very wealth creation that they’d need to exploit.

The most obvious way to fix it is just less government interference and spending, although maybe that’s quaint to suggest amid today’s $39.8 trillion debt and counting. Retirees will of course argue that they already paid into the system to receive their benefits. But meaningfully slashing the bloated welfare state, targeting first such fraud-prone programs as food stamps and Medicaid, could make young people feel less cheated. And promoting construction with minimal red tape and regulation is essential to driving housing prices down for them.

If there is a Boomer–Zoomer war, the government laid the groundwork for it.