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You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
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Mom is overwhelmingly likely to be a homeowner and be able to indefinitely defer property taxes.
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Mathematically someone has to balance the books here. The total cost is the same whether it's concentrated or diffused, the difference is who pays for it.
Sure, some people benefit by having their parent's care socialised, but I think that's rarely Nick 30 ans - his parents are generally not that far gone yet and if he had to subsidize them he would at least get a say over how much, what extent, how much healthcare, etc.
You wouldn't pay Mom's rent anyway, Mom is more likely to have property, which she then might have to liquidate. Some people would have to pay Mom's rent. Mom might live a lot less well than under boomer UBI.
Most people get their inheritance in their 50s. I think on average it'd be better for UMC people to not subsidize old people for hope of a diffuse future payout but to rather get to steer the economy now.
Probably and that might mean even more immigration and at some point sovereign defaults.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
Having moved from a Western country to an Asian country where 'elderly are taken care of by their children and tend to cohabit houses' is the norm. The latter seems verymuch more functional than the current metagame of the West? I'm admittedly fortunate in that nobody in either of my families is a high-grade fuckup and I could see how that'd cause issues with the current state of things.
I've got small children, I much prefer having access to elderly members of my wife's family within a 3 minute walk versus my parents having fucked off to Australia's equivalent of Florida that's a 2 hour flight away. There's a ton of issues created by allowing the elderly to do luxury space communism.
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