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Hyperbole aside, I am skeptical of the claim that it's the interest of boomers which are driving housing policy. To be sure, those boomers who bought houses between 1968 and 1995 have seen tremendous appreciation in home values, but there are other possible reasons for this increase other than legislative decisions aimed at serving the boomers.
A more likely scenario, in my opinion, is the urbanization trend which has been going on for quite some time now. For work, school, and cultural opportunities, lots of people want to live near big cities like New York, which arguably drives up the price of housing. An interesting example of this occurs in Israel, which has a much smaller overall percentage of baby boomers than the United States or Western Europe. And a government which is very much pro-growth. Nevertheless, it's crazy expensive to buy a house or apartment in Tel Aviv. And why not? That's where the fancy jobs are; that's where the nice restaurants are; etc.
So I guess I would ask for your evidence/argument for why housing shortages are due to legislative prioritization of baby boomers and not other causes such as urbanization.
This was an issue 20 years ago, well before the first wave of boomers became eligible for Medicare. Of course, if your argument is simply that setting up the entire Social Security system created an entitlement program with a devoted constituency, making it difficult to cut even when fiscally advisable, then of course I would have to agree. At the moment it's the boomers who are benefiting but pretty soon Generation X will start becoming eligible for Medicare. And I am pretty confident that Generation X will be pretty adamant about receiving those benefits.
I think there is means-testing in the sense that the government imposes a progressive tax on social security benefits. But anyway, as with Medicare this doesn't really seem like a Boomer problem so much as a systemic issue which resulted from decisions made back during the 1930s.
By the way, according to the AI, the annual program cost of Social Security is $1.609 billion while the annual receipts are $1.449 billion. Which is not ideal but it doesn't seem like a massive crisis waiting to happen. Just speculating, but I would guess the gap could be largely fixed through a modest increase in retirement age and higher taxes for wealthy recipients of Social Security.
That being said, given the rapid progress in AI, I doubt it's really necessary to increase retirement ages. Rather, I think that the government should get ready to start reducing the retirement age. Because the best case scenario with AI is that there is mass long-term unemployment. Which in practice means that the government needs to find a way to get money to people, and the obvious way to do this is to make use of the social welfare programs which are already set up: Social Security; Unemployment Insurance; etc.
The housing thing is part of how Anglo countries have generated generational wealth. Homes in America have always been seen as an investment and thus it’s impossible, politically, to let housing prices fall, or even slow the growth of housing prices.
I'm skeptical about this policy you describe, which I will refer to as PHP ("protect housing prices").
How does the PHP policy work in practice? For example, there are parts of the US which are very pro-development. Texas comes to mind. There are also places which are very hostile to development, for example California. There are also areas where housing is very inexpensive, for example the area around Rochester and Buffalo, New York.
How is PHP implemented in all of these different areas?
Also, how do you explain housing prices in non-Anglo countries? I mentioned above that it's crazy expensive to get a house or apartment in or near Tel Aviv. I'm pretty sure the same is true of Rome or Oslo or Stockholm. Is every developed country implementing PHP?
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