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I'm generally against welfare but I do think it does have some actual value even to us who pay for most of it, a more stable and protected society. The default of the world is not modern peace, but more something like a third world country where gangs rule and government is basically just the biggest gang around. It's not perfect in the US, but for the average American crime is not actually that meaningful of issue anymore. Like as Cremieux covered on X, even things like murders are extremely hyperlocal, focused down to specific streets. Unless you go looking for trouble, you'll rarely ever get into it.
A typical leftist claim is that crime comes from poverty and need. I agree that a lot of crime would come from that, but one issue is that poverty, true deep poverty does not exist in the US anymore. The only people who do not get help are the ones who explicitly choose to forego it. There are no hungry orphans left needing to steal bread, our poorest children if anything get too much food now. Crime and antisocial behavior has been reduced only to those who want to do it, not those who are forced into it. And that is at least in part because of our redistribution. I have an aunt who went crazy in her early 50s (I presume in part from the severe abuse that my own father as the oldest was just barely able to escape albeit it with multiple scars, + her possibly being sexually abused) and for some reason in the past five years she somehow just got better? She's not great, but she went from not wanting to do better and living on the streets> wanting to do better, and now she has a shared apartment, a bus pass, clean clothes, food, etc other basics despite not having a job. She is on SSI now and lives in subsidized housing, with other programs like SNAP supporting her. When you want it, help is there. It is not perfect, bureaucracy would never see to that no matter the best intentions but it is there. Similarly I think that's part of why UBI studies seem to do much better in the poor countries and flop hard in the west, I. America we already have the floor available to anyone willing to stand up and work.
But what if it wasn't there for people like her? Well, I don't think she could have escaped her situation then. She's old and still somewhat unstable, I doubt she would have long term employement. Most likely she'd be either a direct parasite off of us or other family, or have to turn to crime now. The welfare services I pay into help to diffuse these costs, sure I pay a little bit to help other people's crazy aunts/brothers/parents/children/whatever relation, but other people pay a little for my family and my father is not left feeling responsible for her through the bad luck that my grandfather was a horrible piece of shit.
Do keep in mind a few things.
They do "deserve" their pensions. Either formally through pension systems or informally like the social security system, our current old people were promised their benefits back in their working years. Maybe the right thing to do is to renege on society's promise to them, or at the very least negotiate the terms better like the UK's stupid "triple lock" but it's not like I can't understand where the olds are coming from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?
We're all going to be old and everyone knows it. A lot of the worries about social security right now I see even among young people is often that they're scared they won't be getting it. Their complaints are the same as the old people, they're just not in the fold yet. But they expect it too, so they're not willing to dissolve things and give up on their share of the promise either. Anything done to the old now is likely to be done with you too and people understand this. Like seriously, how could anyone expect concentration camps for the old unless they were delusional enough to think they'd stay young forever? What 50 year old is gonna be happy with "in 15 years we lock you up and murder you". And that's ignoring that the old are our loved ones and we don't want to hurt our loved ones. What psychopath would want to concentration camp his own parents?
Ah, the protection money argument. The thing is, the west didn't use to have to handout masses of money to people to keep them from rioting. Crime and poverty are not as connected as is often made out.
That is not "Boomer UBI". Disability pensions and the like also get abused but are the far smaller evil.
There are infinitely many options between "total boomer luxury communism" and "concentration camps for the olds". Though politically we seem to tend towards the former...
What does "deserve" mean? Pensions (and even things like 410k) are a fiction, they are redistribution from working people to pensioners. Money is a neat abstraction that allows expression of deferring consumption but if you look at the flow of goods and services it's always working -> non-working, barring AI and general (non-healthcare/welfare) capital infrastructure investment.
Of course I understand the boomers. Were I a boomer I'd have a massive incentive to believe I'm entitled to relief on property taxes, blocking development, fat pensions that grow faster than inflation, labour markets being propped up by mass immigration of "carers" without care for externalities, etc.
The social contract (as it even exists) when the boomers were working was markedly different from the one now. The boomers reneged on it already by not reproducing and offloading the resultant externalities on the next generation.
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1 is somewhat absurd when a huge chunk of people aren't meaningfully paying for themselves, and as a younger person I've got the full expectation that whatever current plans for funding the elderly will be nuked from orbit by the time I'm in any position to get hold of them. People simply aren't working enough years in comparison to an extended dotage of consuming insane amounts of medical spending. Something has to give.
Plus the current state of effective years of healthy living added to the end of people's lives versus 'we have continued the heartbeat at massive expensive' is not good calculus. MAID is unfortunate but to a certain degree the calculus of these efforts would work a lot better if palliative medical science hadn't responded so effectively to the gigantic pool of money on offer to squeeze another year or two out at the very end.
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Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed at nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
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Why do you think MAID is being pushed so hard? We won't "murder" you, we'll just convince you life isn't worth living and let you murder yourself. Conveniently, we've already been abusing this method of avoiding the costs of helping certain demographics for years by ignoring the causes of elevated rates of suicide...
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