Much has been said about the key aspect of the Ponzi scheme behind America's welfare state (if not enough where it matters as the three living Fed Chairmen currently joke around during the Fed's shindig on the central bank's 100th anniversary), namely that all those who have paid in money to entitlements, are entitled to benefit from entitlement distributions in the future. On paper this is absolutely correct, and in an efficient market, without capital allocation distortions this would work (ignoring that a Ponzi scheme, is, by definition, a Ponzi scheme and is reliant on ever greater inflows of money and participants or, as some may call them, suckers). More importantly, this is also fair. Sadly, as recent experiments within the Obama administration and elsewhere, most notably France, when the entire developed world has hit "peak debt" levels, the fairness doctrine no longer works, especially if and when it is enforced upon a destitute population.

Since we don't live in a paper world, one should be able to quantify the disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots" when it comes to entitlements. This is precisely what Larry Kotlikoff did in August 2013 in "How the millennial generation will pay the price of Washington's paralysis." The results, charted, show what JPM's Michael Cembalest has dubbed, accurately, "generational theft", or the difference between how much excess some Americans will have received in government benefits (the older ones), compared to how great the funding deficit is for others - mostly young Americans, those who are about to graduated from college with record amounts of student loans (on average) and those yet unborn.

Cembalest's summary:

After you graduate, the US will be in the thick of the “generational theft” issue; here’s a heads-up on what this is all about. Generational accounting is an estimate of who benefits from and who pays for government programs. As shown in the first chart, the average person in the generation that turned 65 this year received $327 thousand dollars more in lifetime government benefits than they paid in Federal taxes. On the other hand, children born in the future (e.g., yours) will have a lifetime deficit on this basis of -$421 thousand dollars. If it sounds unfair, it is.

It seems that these days few things are fair. Which is perhaps why the rulers are desperate to do everything in their power to "enforce" their idea of fairness on everyone.