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Of course, this is not news to those on the left who favor increasing Social Security benefits , an idea that now commands considerable support among Democrats in Congress, or who’ve condemned the White House for outlining a series of reforms that would reduce future Medicare spending, many of which were first proposed by the Obama administration . Whereas Democrats in the Obama era felt obliged to at least gesture toward fiscal rectitude, Democrats in the Trump era are increasingly convinced that doing so is at best a politically profitless undertaking. By 2018, O’Rourke had joined 150 of his Democratic colleagues in the Expand Social Security Caucus.

But the truth is that O’Rourke’s younger self was right on the merits. There really is a rock-solid egalitarian case for preventing old-age entitlements from gobbling up an ever-larger share of federal spending, and if O’Rourke hopes to build his presidential candidacy on something more than his supposed Gen X magnetism, he ought to consider making it while his many rivals race leftward.

As of now, the U.S. federal government devotes far more spending to the old than to the young. Eugene Steuerle, a scholar at the Urban Institute, estimates that federal subsidies per child are roughly one-sixth the level of subsidies per senior citizen , and federal benefits for children are set to decrease over time. This is despite the fact that 45 percent of infants and toddlers in the United States live in households with an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level , a low-income share substantially higher than among the elderly .

Redressing this imbalance is a perfectly legitimate policy objective, and a number of proposals, such as the American Family Act recently introduced by Senators Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown, aim to do just that. But Bennet and Brown are largely silent on the small matter of how they would finance their generous new child benefit. Unless we’re willing to contemplate drastic middle-class tax increases , and not just the boutique taxes on the ultrarich that are all the rage among Democratic politicians wary of alienating their upper-middle-income constituents, the only fiscally sound way to increase spending on the young will be to contain the growth of old-age entitlement programs. In other words, O’Rourke’s heretical thoughts about Social Security and Medicare are perfectly compatible with his professed desire to boost public investment in America’s younger generations.

Read: O’Rourke mostly gets a pass for his lack of specifics