In a column last week, Ron Brownstein postulated that the opposition by most Democrats to President Obama's budget that would cut Social Security benefits is deluded, that we haven't caught up yet with the politics of the party’s changing electoral coalition, what he calls the "'coalition of the ascendant,'—minorities, the millennial generation, and college-educated whites, especially women" who supposedly care more about the young people in their families than the old people in their families. That's reflected in Obama's budget, Brownstein argues, which gives more to children as it takes away from seniors.

Ezra Klein then picked up the argument and presented a graph from the Urban Institute showing that "the federal government spends $7 on the elderly for every $1 it spends on kids." Well, yes and no. For one thing, what that ignores is that some of that money being spent on the elderly is money the elderly paid in taxes in order to get it back when they retired. They are earned benefits, paid into the system by all of us for the express purpose of helping out our parents, grandparents, and eventually ourselves in old age. It also ignores the fact that a good chunk of that spending is in health care, which is actually being plowed back into corporations, the for-profit health care industry. This push to pit young versus old, depressingly, furthers one of they key elements the Pete Peterson/Catfood coalition has been pushing for years: generational warfare. Just think of Alan Simpson and his "greedy geezers" who are out to steal from every younger generation (ignoring the fact that they paid for what they're getting).

Dean Baker has a better idea of who is actually taking government resources away from the kids (millions of whom depend on social security, by the way). How much spending, he wonders, is going to the rich in the form of interest payments on the federal debt?

We can get a ballpark measure of how much of this interest will go to the rich by simply assuming that their share of the government debt is proportionate to the share of all wealth in the country. According to a recent paper by Ed Wolff, the richest one percent in the United States own 42 percent of non-housing wealth.
If we apply this number to interest paid on the debt, it means that 94.1 billion will be paid as interest to the wealthy in 2013. Dividing that by the 3.16 million people in the richest one percent gives us $29,800 per rich person. That compares to $12,300 per kid according to the Urban Institute.

Assuming the distribution of wealth does not change over the course of the decade, the government will be spending $107,300 per rich person in 2023. If we adjust this number for inflation and the growth of the economy, we would be spending $70,400 per rich person in 2023, as shown [above]. Perhaps we should be asking why we place so much more priority on helping the rich than helping our kids.

If you add in the subsidies to the too-big-to-fail banks, Baker calculates, then you can add in another $26,300 to the very rich. Baker's ultimate point is that the amount of money diverted to the very wealthy in everything from cut-rate corporate taxes to copyright monopolies to bank bailouts far exceeds what's spent on making sure Americans have secure old ages. That's a conflict that is at least as valid, and far more politically potent, to argue about as how our grandparents are stealing from the children.