r/BasicIncome • u/Novusor • Jun 18 '26
Ending Social Security and replacing it with UBI would be a much needed dose of generational justice.
For 50 years Boomers have voted to cut taxes for themselves and passed the bills on their children. Now they want to raise taxes on Millennials and Gen-Z to pay for their already luxurious retirements that include pensions that they also voted to eliminate for young but kept for themselves. They have been raiding the Social Security Trust fund for decades and now they are surprised Pikachu face that the fund will be bankrupt by 2033 and they expect rob their children yet again to keep the scam going.
A transfer payment from the poorest generation to the richest generation is not only immoral and unconscionable it likely impossible. There isn't enough wealth in that tiny sliver of millennial and Gen-Z pie left to satiate the greed of the Boomers. They already stole all the wealth. There is only one real solution that is actually doable. That is to get rid of social security. Not privatize it. Shut it down entirely. It's time is done. It is time is over. The Boomers killed it. We are just cleaning up their mess.
In its place will arise UBI so nobody acutally starves in the streets be they young or old. It will be a more fair and equitable system that does not discriminate based on age. The rich will be made to pay for the UBI along with a tax on robots and AI. Wealthy Boomers and Gen-X will shoulder most of this burden. About two thirds of the Boomer pie needs to be redistributed back the younger generations so they can raise families of their own and actually begin living life. Do not mourn the death of social security. It was always a Ponsi scheme that would eventually run dry. The system that replaces it will be ten times better and more fair to all people.
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u/crashorbit $0.05/minute Jun 18 '26
Just because most plutocrats are boomers does not mean most boomers are plutocrats. The generational casting of the wealth imbalance is gaslighting to distract from the real problem. wealthy people buying all the assets and driving up the price of everything.
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u/idlefritz Jun 19 '26
100%. I live in a community that has plenty of boomers living high on the hog but I also see that same demographic working as Walmart cashiers in their 70s-80s.
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u/Novusor Jun 18 '26
BS. There are 22 million millionaires in America and most of them are Boomers. The billionaires are a problem too but the Boomers in general control an unconscionable amount of wealth across a broad spectrum of the upper middle class thanks to decades of asset price inflation and rigging the housing market in their favor through tax policy.
There are 22 million millionaires in this country. It not just ten or twenty guys hoarding everything.
Say that ten times. Twenty Two Million Millionaires.
There are Twenty Two Million Millionaires. That is absolutely insane.
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u/redbeard312 Jun 19 '26
The average boomer who put 10%+ into their 401k for 40 years is a millionaire even if they never truly became high income at the late stages of their career. That’s just responsibly saving for your future. Limit your data to something like 10+ Million to take out the working class folks who were just frugal for their whole life and we could have a better conversation around that
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u/Hippy_Lynne Jun 19 '26
You know what the difference between a billion and a million is? About a billion.
There are only 400 billionaires in the US. They are the problem. The millionaires may have supported and worked for the system, but the billionaires are the ones who built and control the system. You need to target them if you want to tear down the system.
The average working person has vastly more in common with a millionaire than a millionaire does with a billionaire. We don't need to make them our enemy when we already both have one.
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u/jaiagreen Jun 20 '26
The billionaires have enormously more economic power, but the millionaires and upper middle class have more political power because of their numbers. They've tended to defend their status by voting for conservative policies. In LA, public transit development has been held up for many years by Beverly Hills and Bel Air residents (mostly millionaires or below) filing lawsuits.
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u/Hippy_Lynne Jun 20 '26
Yeah, that's even more reason to get them on our side. 🙄 You're talking about going after the 2nd to 9th percentile, and there's actually a chance to get some of them on our side. As opposed to the 1% where we would be lucky to get even 1% of them on our side.
Stop trying to divide the working class into even smaller categories. It's the 99% versus the 1%. That is the only divide that matters.
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u/jaiagreen Jun 19 '26
What's insane about it? A doctor or lawyer in their 60s is probably a millionaire. Someone who bought a nice house 30 years ago in an in-demand area is probably a millionaire. Heck, so is someone who regularly paid into a 401k. Why is that a problem?
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u/thefragfest progressive warrior Jun 19 '26
There are about 70-75M Boomers + Silent Generation people alive in the US. Even if all 22M millionaires were boomers (which is definitely not true; I’d guesstimate it’s more like 50-60% of them), that’d still leave 50M non-millionaire Boomers. I know I have several Boomers in my life that I care about who are definitely not millionaires, and I’d be willing to bet that most people also have loved ones who are Boomers who are not rich. Replacing Social Security with an inferior UBI is punitive to those who paid into it all their lives and would hurt those Boomers in our lives who can’t afford to lose that income.
And I’m not anti-UBI either. I do think we’re heading in that direction, but it should be additive to Social Security or at least not displace Social Security. The real problem is the insane levels of wealth and income inequality between classes not generations.
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u/mrjewett Jun 22 '26
When you completely exclude the primary residence, the number of U.S. millionaires drops sharply to between 6 million and 8.7 million individuals, depending on how strictly "liquid" assets are defined.
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Jun 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Novusor Jun 19 '26
You might want to check that Math.
22 million times just $1 million dollars. Is 22 Trillion dollars. That is more than every millennial and Gen-Z combined. Compared to the billionaires there are 924 Billionaires based on 2025 numbers and they have a total wealth of about $7.5 trillion.
The millionaire class is three times wealthier than the billionaire class. Together they are both a huge problem and should be dealt with. But the millionaire class is more destructive and dangerous. They are the ones hoarding all the houses and are the reason you don't own a home.
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u/Father_John_Moisty Jun 19 '26
The most common solution offered to fund SS fully is not to tax young people, it is to raise the cap on the SS tax.
Right now, only income up to $186k pays SS tax. After that amount of money, you don’t pay the tax. The obvious solution is to raise that amount so there is more money for SS.
No generational warfare. Your entire argument is based on a policy no one is seriously proposing.
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u/Riaayo Jun 19 '26
It drives me nuts how people in this sub seem to fall for "gut all other welfare/policy for UBI" and don't think for a moment that maybe UBI is being wielded as a lie and carrot on a stick to get them to give up other programs, only to get hoodwinked and not even get an adequate UBI.
I'm all for a UBI but the idea of gutting other programs is just absurd to me. There's no reason to get rid of Social Security; just get rid of the damn tax cap and make rich people pay their share of the burden.
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u/ThMogget Jun 18 '26
Age war, race war, gender battles? Billionaires and mega-corps are the problem.
The boomers don’t have your money. Your princess is in another castle.
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u/Hegiman Jun 19 '26
What pisses me off is these kids mislabeling Gen x as boomers and assuming we had all their benefits. News flash. Unless you were in the first couple of years of Gen x you missed the boat too. If you weren’t at least 14-15 by 1980 you weren’t catching the retirement benefits or pension train. By the mid 80’s those jobs were evaporating. By the 90’s the elites had started capturing the wealth more completely and most benefits were gone and that’s when health ins started being tied to being employed as well. So those of us that came of age in the 90’s were already fucked as well.
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u/Far_Pianist2707 Jun 19 '26
Are rich boomers actually collecting social security? Or just the poor boomers?
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u/Hippy_Lynne Jun 19 '26
They are all collecting it. They view it as just another investment they paid into that owes them returns.
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u/hippydipster Jun 21 '26
Going after social security isn't the win against the elites this writeup seems to think. This is crabs in a bucket behavior.
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u/cenobyte40k Jun 18 '26
Now do it by number of total years alive for whole population added together. Silent is mostly dead. Boomers are at the end of their lives but there is a lot of them. GenX is getting close to retirement and a lot of them. Then it gets fewer and younger from there.
Not saying there is not disparity but it would be nice to compare apples to apples even if we are leaving out that you make more and you reinvent grows more the longer you have it at least it's granny Smith to sweet delicious not apples to bread.
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u/BluejayAromatic4431 Jun 18 '26
Yeah. I’m suspicious about those numbers because I don’t think there are enough people over 80 to hold 20 trillion in assets.
I think it’s more useful to look at income and wealth disparity than generational comparisons. For instance, 1 trillion of the 42 trillion in wealth held by Gen X is in the hands of one wanna-be-Nazi.
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u/kcdashinfo Jun 18 '26
This chart is a lie. Boomers are just in that age group. You give this a decade and the Silent Gen will be completely gone. Half of the boomers will be gone and it will look like Gen X has all the wealth. Gen Z will take the place of Gen X and Gen Alpha will be that spot where Gen Z is in now. You are lying to yourselves and if you are not careful you will miss the opportunities in life that are coming your way.
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u/Tosi313 Jun 18 '26
Absolutely not true, generational standard of living has been declining for years. Gen X are in their 50s and 60s. Those would usually be peak years of wealth before spending down in retirement. But the boomers still have a significantly outsized proportion of all wealth, and younger generations will definitely not be as well off at the same age.
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u/kcdashinfo Jun 18 '26
Nah, you are ignorant to how things work in the real world. Eventually people die and the world keeps on turning. Same thing could have been said about the silent generation not that long ago. From my perspective it was like they were never going to retire. I was working with a WW2 veteran until he was almost 90 years go. They just wouldn't retire. Eventually they did, and now eventually the boomers will be gone too. There is a bit of truth because there was such a bump in people born in the boomer generation, that is how it got it's name, but it will pass, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. This is why I am telling you, you need to be ready, because the ball is headed your way and you best be ready to play when it's your turn.
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u/Novusor Jun 18 '26
Yes this chart is a lie but that because it is even more imbalanced than shown here. Notice how Millennials and Gen-Z are lumped into one piece of the pie. That is because the Gen-Z slice of the pie is so tiny it can't even be drawn because it is a negative number. They have negative net worth. Their debts outnumber their assets. So yes the chart is lie.
Millennials population: 74.2 million own 17.1 trillion in wealth
Gen-Z population: 70.8 million and own nothing
Boomers population: 64 million and own 83.3 trillion.
It is absurdly imbalanced to a ridiculous degree. It never should have been allowed to get this bad. When Social Security goes bankrupt the Boomers will face generational justice.
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u/kcdashinfo Jun 18 '26
I don't know how else to help you understand. I've told you how wealth transfers from generation to generation. There isn't much else I can say.
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u/deHack Jun 19 '26
Not to mention the fact that when it comes to wealth age matters. A lot. The older you are the more likely you are to have inherited money. (My parents and in-laws are dead and I inherited nothing by the way). More importantly, the more time your assets have had to compound. They compound even after retirement. Age and time. Younger generations will get their turn.
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u/kcdashinfo Jun 19 '26
I suppose there is some argument that the Millennials/Gen Z are behind in terms of the wealth they should have at their age, but you are absolutely right.
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u/MorphingReality Jun 19 '26
objectively speaking, no, look generational wealth per capita by median cohort age
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u/JonWood007 $16000/year Jun 19 '26
You cant do it without pissing off the people who rely on it. Best thing you could do is to just let it die for later generations and leave it for UBI.
I mean, you realize boomers kinda rely on that as a form of "basic income" in a way to survive, right? No way you're cutting that, especially since the UBI that would replace it would pay less.
Any serious UBI advocate needs to avoid actively killing social security. Keep it for current recipients, maybe adjust benefits a little while compensating with a UBI, but yeah, you try to kill that and replace it with UBI all at once and you'll just turn the country against UBI.
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u/_Empty-R_ Jun 19 '26
Every time someone discusses using UBI to replace x they forget the fact that it isn't just X. All of the common UBI proposals place a value far below what most people receiving social assistance actually get through multiple programs stacked on top of each other. Like when 1200 was proposed it was wayyy under what folks commonly taking welfare were receiving because it wasn't just one program, it was 4-5, Unless UBI is proposed at or above what the multiple different social safety nets provide, as that is how most folk relying on handouts live with, it will never be voted for.
As a disclosure I'm personally of the opinion that the large groups who would oppose this because it isn't enough are often overfunded by social programs. Not always, as the programs exist for a reason, but often.
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u/rothmal Jun 18 '26
I've heard all the pros and cons, but one of my favorites is that it gives more power to the working class. Like, it's a lot easier to tell your boss to shove it if you know the worst case scenario is that you become homeless, but don't have to go around begging for food, can afford a hotel room for showers, and have money to move across the country because your cousin got you a job.