It’s a black hole money-pit everywhere. There is no return on spending money for people who will never be productive again.
The only way that kind of wealth transfer works is with a growing proportion of workers, but that has long not been the case in many developed countries.
The solution for all these countries (even the US) is to dismantle all wealth transfer to old people. It might be the only way to incentivize production of families that raise productive children. Or tell old people to expect declining quality of life (faster than it already is).
The west is caught in a web of its own creation. We have basically incentivized the countries to get older by taxing the young to subsidize the rich.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way for democracy to correct this. older people vote and are wealthier. Both of those mean they have large political power.
Doesn't this create a situation where the old rely on their own younger generation to support them?
And therefore inequality between older people who have families (or have families that care about them) and those that don't?
I can see this particularly being a problem for countries like the UK which has long encouraged "upwardly-mobile" people to move away from their towns of origin in pursuit of economic opportunity, leading to families being widely dispersed across a country which, despite its fairly small size, is not especially fast to travel around.
The only way that kind of wealth transfer works is with a growing proportion of workers, but that has long not been the case in many developed countries.
The solution for all these countries (even the US) is to dismantle all wealth transfer to old people. It might be the only way to incentivize production of families that raise productive children. Or tell old people to expect declining quality of life (faster than it already is).