A generational tax battle has arrived. Millennials struggle to build wealth — while boomers seek tax breaks.

Taylor Scriber, a millennial living in Texas, is trying to join the growing ranks of his generation and buy his first home. He's been scouring listings with his real estate agent, taking a few tours to see what suits him best, and estimating his potential costs, including property taxes.

The final piece of that homeowning puzzle has been stuck in Scriber's craw lately. After reading recent headlines about property taxes in the Lone Star state being slashed for older residents and those with disabilities, he started to feel that he may end up shouldering the fiscal burden through his own payments with resulting rate hikes — and costing out worst case scenarios for what the cost of his future home might realistically look like, since so many homes have those abatements. After all, since Texas has no income tax, sales and property taxes are key in funding municipal services, like

"You're stuck there, and you're looking at an inevitable property tax increase, because a group of people are voting to opt themselves out," he says. Almost 40% of homesteads in Texas pay no property taxes for school districts. That includes about 61% of older and disabled homeowners, up from 44% in 2024. Scriber's family and friends over the age of 65 all seem sympathetic when he brings up the issue — at first. They agree that increasingly foisting more of the cost of a functional society onto younger generations could be a problem, but then they start thinking further.

"They just kind of thought about it for a moment, and they were like, 'But I want my property taxes to be lowered,'" he says.

A generational tax battle has begun to envelop the US. The current beef stretches far beyond timeless "kids these days" and "OK boomer" finger-pointing. It's turning one of America's rare forms of collective support — taxes and the social safety nets they help fund — into yet another individualistic debate, and it could have economic consequences for decades to come.

For both the young and no-longer-young, the animus for the tax war comes from the same place: A sense of economic precarity.

Older Americans spent decades imagining a comfortable, or at least stable, retirement with Social Security undergirding their personal savings. Instead, boomers' golden years are feeling much more precarious than they expected. For one, they're living on a less-than-hoped-for retirement income: Just over 57% of Americans over the age of 65 have annual incomes under $40,000, according to Business Insider's analysis of the Current Population Survey. Boomers were the first generation to hit the workforce as pensions faded, and their self-directed savings aren't as large as many of them had hoped.

For younger generations, the promise of long-term stability seems like a bygone idea. Just a quarter of 18 to 49-year-olds are confident in the future of Social Security, according to an AARP survey, and a separate Gallup poll found that 53% of the same age cohort think it's unlikely that Social Security and Medicare will be available in 10 years. They've hit a "career apocalypse," and their real income growth has dramatically slowed down. As the taxes to keep the social safety net from fraying are increasingly shifted toward them, it feels like a bum deal — especially as the benefits of their

The issue is in the balance of power: Both groups feel like they are floundering, but one is more politically potent. Boomers are more likely to be registered to vote than their younger peers: A Census analysis finds that voters ages 18 to 29 and those 30 to 44 were both underrepresented in the 2024 election, while voters 65 and older were overrepresented by 3.5 percentage points.

"Older people vote at higher rates than younger people. And as long as that's the case, lawmakers are going to be more responsive to the desires and demands of older people than younger people," Emily Ekins, an author of a report on Social Security sentiment from the libertarian Cato Institute report on Social Security sentiment, tells me. A mobilized, dissatisfied constituency holds a lot of sway, and that's played out in targeted carve-outs.

Take the example of state income taxes: The left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that every state with a personal income tax has tax subsidies for seniors, and those subsidies are generally poorly targeted — meaning that higher-income seniors are paying less than lower-earning younger workers. That analysis finds that only 11 states offered credits and exemptions for private pensions, a key source of income for wealthier seniors, in 1977. By 1990, that number had grown to 21 states and hit 27 — a majority of states — in 2023.

"The plight of low-income seniors gets used as a Trojan horse to push through very, very large tax cuts for senior citizens broadly and often with a very large share of those cuts flowing to the best-off seniors who need them the least," Carl Davis, one of the ITEP report authors, tells me.