Why Gen Z Is The First Generation That Politicians Have Completely Given Up On

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Picture a 24 year old who did everything right, went to college, got the degree, paid the tuition, is now pulling around $68,000 a year at an entry-level job in a city where rent runs 2,200 a month.

[00:00:14]She's spending close to 40% of her gross income on housing alone. She hasn't even touched her student loan repayment schedule yet. She cannot save for a down payment because she's already spending the down payment on rent every single year. She calls her senator's office to ask about housing affordability. Her senator is 71 years old, owns three properties, just got reelected for the fifth consecutive term. His office sends her a PDF about budgeting. Meanwhile, the median age of voting members of the House of Representatives is 57.5 years, while the Senate's median age is 64.7 years. The average age of the 119th Congress is 59 years old. The median age of Americans by comparison is 38 years old. The people making decisions about your financial future are on average 21 years older than you. They own multiple properties and they have zero financial skin in the game when it comes to making housing cheaper. And here is the question I want you to hold on to for the next 20 minutes. Is that an accident? And today I want to explain something that most financial channels skip entirely because it's not a strategy. It's a system. And the system is this. Gen Z is the first generation that politicians have structurally, mathematically, and almost elegantly given up on. Not because they hate young people, not because there is a conspiracy, but because the incentive machine that drives American democracy has been calibrated over decades to reward serving older voters and to produce near zero consequences for ignoring younger ones. We're going to explain how this machine works, why it's getting worse, and what you can actually do about it. Because understanding the machine is the first move. Everything else comes after. Let me introduce the metaphor I'm going to use throughout this video because I want you to have a frame that's precise enough to be useful. Think of the political system as a vending machine. You insert coins, you get policy out. The coins are votes, campaign donations, civic engagement, and consistent political participation.

[00:02:15]The policy comes out as laws. subsidies, tax structures, housing regulations, spending priorities. The vending machine does not care who deserves a snack. It does not care who needs a snack most urgently. It cares entirely and mechanically about who puts coins in reliably, consistently, every single cycle. If a demographic inserts coins in every election, local, state, federal, midterm, presidential, the machine dispenses policy for them generation after generation. If a demographic inserts coins inconsistently or only during high-profile elections or complains loudly on social media without actually going to the polls, the machine largely ignores them. It's not moral.

[00:03:00]It's not ideological. It's just a machine following its own logic. And right now, Gen Z is consistently bad at inserting coins, and everyone over 65 is extraordinarily good at it. Let's start with the economic data because some of you are already half-tuned out thinking this is going to be generational, complaining, dressed up as analysis.

[00:03:20]It's not. The numbers are real, and they're ugly in a specific way that requires explanation. Baby boomers have accumulated a collective net worth of $82 trillion, more than double that of Gen X and four times that of millennials. For millennials and Gen Z combined, those born after 1981, total wealth stands at 17.1 trillion. Now, the instinct is to say, of course, boomers have more wealth. They're older. They had more time. But that explanation only gets you so far because when you compare the same generations at the same age, same life stage, inflation adjusted, the gap is still significant. Both younger generations are still tracking behind their parents at the same age with high housing costs and economic uncertainty continuing to stand in the way. Here is the housing comparison that crystallizes this cleanly. The average home price in 1976, when the oldest boomers were turning 30, was $42,800, which adjusted for inflation, would be $242,000 today. The average home at the end of 2025 was $45,300.

[00:04:27]1.5 times more expensive when adjusted for inflation. So, not just nominally more expensive, actually more expensive in real purchasing power terms. Mortgage rates are still more than double their pandemic era lows. Home prices remain historically high and buyers still need to earn $112,000 to afford the medianric US home roughly $25,000 more than the median US income. That last sentence is the one that should stop you. The income you need to be a median home buyer is $25,000 per year above what the median person actually earns. This is not a marginal gap. This is a structural exclusion from the single most powerful wealth-b buildinging instrument in American history. About 67% of Gen Z adults say they struggle to cover housing costs, but compared to slightly more than half of millennials and Gen Xers and 36% of baby boomers. In 2025, the share of firsttime home buyers plummeted to a record low of 21% while the typical age of firsttime buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40 years.

[00:05:33]40. The average age to buy your first home is now 40 years old. That number was around 29 in the 1980s. This is not people taking their time. This is the math not working. And the collateral damage is generational in scope. Today, an unprecedented 52% of Americans ages 18 to 29 live with a parent or grandparent, displaying the highest level since the 1940s. Importantly, this is not driven by widespread unemployment. The key impediment is affordability. Lower starting salaries that have failed to keep pace with inflation, paired with rent increases that dramatically outstrip the fixed rates many parents locked in years ago.

[00:06:12]Let me walk through the basic math because abstractions are easy to dismiss and numbers are harder to argue with.

[00:06:19]New college grads earn about $68,400 on average, but Gen Z graduates don't experience it as an advantage. They expected to earn $101,500 in their first job. That's a $33,100 expectation gap. So, they borrowed money, paid tuition, spent four years credentiing themselves, and emerged into a market that delivered roughly 2/3 of what they were promised. Meanwhile, 84% of Gen Z with student loan debt have put off major investments such as buying a home or starting a business. That's not a small group of people with bad financial discipline. That's a structural feature of the system.

[00:06:57]Financial insecurity among Gen Z jumped from 30% in 2024 to 48% in 2025, an 18 percentage point increase, representing a 60% spike in just one year. So, the economic hole is documented. The question that matters more and the question that explains why nothing changes is why the political machine has no strong incentive to fix it. Here is where most people misread the problem.

[00:07:23]And this is the reversal that changes how you think about the whole thing. You think the problem is that politicians don't care about Gen Z. But actually the problem is that politicians are doing exactly what the incentive machine tells them to do. They are not malfunctioning.

[00:07:37]They are operating correctly within a system that rewards serving reliable voters and punishes serving unreliable ones. Understanding this distinction changes everything about how you respond to it. Let me walk through the voter math because this is the mechanical core of the whole argument. Historically, ages 18 to 29 have had the lowest voter turnout among all voting blocks. It was estimated that just 42% of young voters cast a ballot in the 2024 election cycle compared to a turnout of about 53% in 2020. That is a decline, a significant one. In the same election, 58% of Americans ages 45 to 64 and 67% of Americans over 65 voted in the midterms.

[00:08:20]Midterms, where the real legislative battles happen, where committee chairs are decided, where budget priorities are set, are almost entirely dominated by older voters. Now, run the calculation from a political consultant's perspective. You have a finite campaign budget. You need to target persuadable and mobilizable voters. Your data tells you that older voters turn out in every election. Rain shine, interesting cycle, boring cycle, presidential, midterm.

[00:08:46]Your data tells you that younger voters are highly elastic, heavily dependent on excitement, and high stakes narratives.

[00:08:53]Which demographic do you build your policy platform to serve? The answer is obvious, and it's not evil. It's math.

[00:09:00]Only 19% of young voters reported hearing from campaigns leading up to the 2024 election. 19. One in five campaign outreach is expensive, targeted, and ruthlessly ROId driven. They don't contact demographics with low conversion rates. So, young people are not reached, and the feedback loop tightens. They're not reached. They feel unrepresented.

[00:09:23]They don't vote. They're not reached again. Now, look at who is actually in the room making decisions. With an average member age of 58.9 years old, the 119th Congress is the third oldest since 1789. In the House, Maxwell Frost is beginning his second term as still the only Gen Z member of Congress at age 27. One Gen Z member out of 435 seats.

[00:09:47]There were 44 congressional districts in which the age of the representative was more than double the median age of their constituents. More than double. A 60-year-old legislator representing a district where the median constituent is 29 years old. The vending machine is literally operated by people who have never been customers of the vending machine in its current form. Older members of Congress passed legislation that reflected the priorities of the older, more powerful majority in America. They placed limits on new housing development, created tax structures that favored the accumulation of wealth and bolstered retirement protections that younger generations may never see. That's not a conspiracy. That is what representatives do when they serve their constituents. Boomers were the constituents. Boomers got the policy. The vending machine worked exactly as designed. Look at how this plays out in practice on tax policy. The US tax code taxes long-term capital gains income from assets you already own at 15 to 20% for most households. It taxes wage income at 22 to 37% depending on bracket. So, if you own things, your income is taxed at a significantly lower rate than if you work for a living. Baby boomers hold 54% of stocks worth more than $25 trillion. Millennials owned about 8% of stocks worth $3.9 trillion.

[00:11:09]Gen Z owns even less. The structure that taxes capital more favorably than labor overwhelmingly benefits the generation that owns the capital. That structure has remained intact for decades. The vending machine keeps dispensing it because the people who put the most coins in, boomers, are also the people who benefit most from the tax code staying exactly where it is. Look at zoning. The single biggest driver of housing unaffordability is supply constraint. There are not enough homes.

[00:11:38]The reason there are not enough homes is not complicated. America is building fewer homes per 100,000 people than it did in 1975.

[00:11:46]The reason is local zoning laws, minimum lot sizes, single family-only zoning, height restrictions, lengthy permitting processes that have been in place for decades, passed by homeowners who had a direct financial incentive to keep supply constrained and property values high. Who votes in local elections and zoning board meetings? Older homeowners.

[00:12:07]Who suffers most from restricted supply?

[00:12:09]People trying to enter the housing market predominantly younger. The vending machine keeps zoning laws largely intact because the coin insertters benefit from them. And if you're finding this framework useful, money as a system, incentives as mechanics, not vibes, subscribe. I don't post on a schedule. I post when I find a pattern worth explaining, but it's worth being in the loop for when I do. Now, let me give you the budget numbers because this is where the abstract becomes uncomfortably concrete. Retirees ages 65 and older receive $2.7 trillion in federal spending or 62% of all age assignable federal outlays driven mainly by social security and Medicare.

[00:12:49]Children and young adults under age 26 receive $449 billion or 10% of age assignable outlays concentrated in Medicaid, SNAP, child nutrition, and education programs. There are roughly 62 million Americans over 65. There are roughly 104 million Americans under 26.

[00:13:10]The smaller older group receives six times the federal resources of the larger younger group. On a per person basis, the gap is even more dramatic.

[00:13:20]Social Security directs $1.3 trillion to retirees and Medicare sends 835 billion.

[00:13:27]Together, they account for 80% of all age assignable spending on older adults.

[00:13:32]These are not programs under political threat. Both parties have made clear they will not meaningfully reform them because the people who rely on these programs insert coins at extraordinary rates and the machine follows its own logic from fiscal year 2025 to 2035.

[00:13:49]Nominal spending will grow by 53%. About 83% of this increase can be explained by only three parts of the federal budget.

[00:13:56]Social security, health care, and net interest on the national debt. That means everything else, education, housing assistance, workforce development, infrastructure, the programs that benefit people in the wealthb buildinging phase of life gets crowded out as a share of the budget over the next decade. The trajectory is mechanical. It does not require bad intentions. It just requires math.

[00:14:18]Here's the second order effect that almost nobody talks about. Gen Z is paying payroll taxes right now. every paycheck. FICA, a fixed percentage going directly into Social Security and Medicare for current retirees. That's the intergenerational deal. You fund the current generation of retirees. Future workers fund you. Standard contract, except the demographic math is working against this contract. The number of workers per retiree was 5.1 in 1960, declined to 3.3 in 2007, and is projected to decline to 2.1 by 2040. two workers per retiree. The math of that is unsustainable at current benefit levels without either benefit cuts, tax increases, or both. Social Security alone will be responsible for 28% of all new federal spending growth through 2035. Gen Z is paying into a system that will almost certainly need structural reform before they retire. Which means the generation getting the hardest deal economically on the front end may also receive a diminished version of the deal they were promised on the back end.

[00:15:22]They're inserting coins into a machine that might not even dispense for them.

[00:15:26]Imagine pitching a startup to a venture capitalist and your deck literally says, "Users contribute to the platform throughout their working lives, receive diminished returns upon retirement, and have zero political leverage to change the terms. The VC throws you out of the building." Congress has been running this business model on Gen Z since they were born and calls it fiscal responsibility. Now, here's the deepest layer, and this is the part that took me a while to see clearly. Most of the conversation around Gen Z's economic position focuses on the symptom. Housing is expensive. Wages are stagnant, debt is heavy. All true, but the actual mechanism of the trap is more subtle than any of those individual problems.

[00:16:07]The trap is that Gen Z is in a position where they need the system to change in order to build wealth. But the system is controlled by people who built their wealth under the old system and have a direct incentive to keep it intact. Let me walk through this at three levels because I find it's cleaner when you see it this way. Level one, you can't buy a home because prices are too high relative to your income. This is visible, measurable, and everyone campaigns on it. Politicians mention it.

[00:16:34]Nothing structurally changes, but they mention it. Level two, the reason prices are so high is partly a supply problem driven by zoning laws controlled by existing homeowners who vote at high rates and benefit financially from housing scarcity. This is less visible.

[00:16:50]Politicians rarely tackle it because doing so would anger their most reliable voters. Older homeowners who don't want affordable apartments built in their neighborhoods. Level three, even if you understood all of this and wanted to change it through democratic participation, the demographic group with the most political power, the group that controls the vending machine, is precisely the group that benefits from the current configuration staying exactly as it is. And they will continue holding that power as long as younger people insert coins at rates far below their older counterparts. The machine is not broken from the machine's perspective. It is perfectly calibrated.

[00:17:27]It's broken from your perspective.

[00:17:28]That's the full trap. Not designed, not conspired, just emergent from the mechanics of a democracy layered on top of a dramatically skewed wealth and voting participation structure. The boomers who dominate Congress, who dominate campaign finance, who dominate voter turnout are also the boomers who own the homes, own the stocks, and benefit from the tax code staying exactly where it is. Let me make this concrete with a realistic scenario because I don't want this to be abstract. Two people, both 25 years old, both earning $60,000 a year, same income, entirely different financial trajectories. Person A, her parents bought a house in 1993 for $160,000.

[00:18:09]Call it 340,000 in today's money. That house is now worth 525,000.

[00:18:15]They have roughly $385,000 in equity. They loan her $80,000 for a down payment on a $310,000 condo. Her mortgage at 6.2% runs approximately $1,430 a month. That's 28% of her gross income. Manageable. She starts building equity on day one. At 5% average annual appreciation over 10 years, that condo is worth approximately $55,000.

[00:18:42]She now has almost $200,000 in equity plus 10 years of principal payown. She is not just housed, she is compounding.

[00:18:50]Person B, his parents are renters. They have no equity, no lendable asset. He needs to save the $80,000 down payment independently at a savings rate of 15% of his $60,000 salary, $9,000 per year.

[00:19:06]He saves that down payment in roughly 8.9 years. He's 34 now. And home prices have moved. A $310,000 home in year 1 might be 400,000 in year 9. He needs another 20,000. He saves for another 2 years. He's 36 when he buys. He's had zero equity accumulation for 12 years.

[00:19:26]Person A has had 12 years of compounding. At 45, assume both still earn similar incomes. Person A has potentially $250,000 to $300,000 in net home equity, plus whatever she has contributed to retirement accounts during the years she wasn't hemorrhaging savings. Person B is still catching up.

[00:19:46]The same income maintained over 20 years produced radically different financial outcomes. Not because of discipline or intelligence, but because of access to intergenerational wealth, which is itself a product of the system we've been describing. The political machine gave person A's parents 40 years of favorable housing conditions. Her parents transferred a fraction of those gains to her. Person B's parents got the same deal the machine offers everyone who can't insert coins, which is nothing. A politician walks up to a 23-year-old during election season and says, "We hear you on housing. It's a priority for us. We're forming a bipartisan task force. The 23-year-old says, "Okay, when does it report?"

[00:20:28]Politician, two years. 23-year-old, my lease is up in 4 months. Politician, have you considered fiscal discipline?

[00:20:36]Then the politician drives home in his leased SUV to a $700,000 house he purchased in 2003 for $190,000.

[00:20:44]So, where does that leave us? What's the actual play? I said at the top of this video that politicians have given up on Gen Z. And I want to be precise about what I mean because given up on is doing a lot of work. I don't mean they formally decided to ignore young people.

[00:20:59]I mean the incentive machine has reached a stable equilibrium where serving Gen Z is not required for political survival.

[00:21:06]Politicians can win, govern, get reelected and retire with full benefits without meaningfully addressing the structural disadvantages facing people under 35. The machine is not broken.

[00:21:17]It's just calibrated for a different customer than you. Given that, here are three practical moves. Not motivational, not generic. Specific things that emerge from understanding the system rather than fighting it emotionally. One, stop optimizing for fairness. Start optimizing for positioning within the actual environment. This is the hardest mindset shift because the instinct is to wait for the system to correct itself before you make your move. But the math doesn't give you that luxury. Prices across both essential expenditures and everyday goods have accelerated far faster than wages. And steep price inflation combined with elevated mortgage rates has created severe affordability challenges for younger generations. That condition is not going to reverse in the next 5 years. Possibly not in the next 10. The people who figure this out first are the ones who stop waiting for permission from a system that doesn't owe them anything and start working around it. More people in their 20s are finding ways to buy despite high prices and mortgage rates, often by purchasing smaller homes, moving to more affordable metros, or leaning on family help. 32% of Gen Z respondents said they are considering co-ying, pooling resources with a friend, sibling, or partner to get access to equity earlier. That's not a compromise. That's a systems play. It's understanding that the machine won't hand you the asset. So you engineer access to it through structure rather than waiting for conditions to improve.

[00:22:43]The vending machine is not going to lower the price of the snack. You figure out how to pool change with someone else, how to find machines in cheaper locations, how to build leverage outside the machine's pricing model. That's the move. Two, understand that your income is not your wealthb buildinging engine.

[00:23:01]Your assets are. The baby boomer generation owes a great deal of their financial security to the stars aligning during their formative years. In the 1970s, when many baby boomers entered the housing market, inflation surged, making buying a home an appealing investment. As home values soared in the following decades, so too did the generation's equity. That's not skill, that's timing within a system. The same logic applies now, but the assets you accumulate in your 20s and early 30s will compound for 30 to 40 years. The math of compound growth is indifferent to political conditions. A dollar invested at 25 is roughly 10 times more powerful than a dollar invested at 45, assuming a 7% average annual return.

[00:23:45]Which means the highest leverage financial window of your life is the one you're currently in. Not because the government said so. Because compound math is undefeated and it doesn't care how old Congress is. If you cannot access real estate right now, you can own real estate indirectly through real estate investment trusts and a taxable brokerage. You can max a Roth IRA.

[00:24:06]Contributions grow tax-free and withdrawals in retirement are untaxed, which is a structural advantage worth understanding. You can build a position in lowcost index funds and let the market's long-term drift work for you.

[00:24:19]None of these require housing affordability to be solved first. None of them require a politician to do anything. They require time, consistency, and a high savings rate.

[00:24:29]The savings rate is where you have the most control, which means the income you generate outside your primary job, the thing I've been doing in parallel for 2 years, is not a nice to have. It's structural leverage. Three, understand where your coins are worth the most.

[00:24:45]While over 40 million members of Gen Z were eligible to vote in 2024, more than 21 million did not cast ballots. 21 million. If even half of those people had voted in down ballot local races, the policy landscape on housing in dozens of American cities would be different right now. I'm not telling you to vote out of civic duty. I'm telling you to vote because the local machine is cheap, it's fast, and young people's coins are worth significantly more per unit at the local level than at the national level. The decisions that directly determine whether your city builds more housing or less housing, whether zoning laws loosen or tighten, whether new apartment buildings get approved or blocked, those decisions are made at city council meetings and zoning board hearings that are often decided by dozens of votes, sometimes fewer. Home prices are rising while single family construction is falling. America is building fewer homes per 100,000 people than it did in 1975. And the majority of Americans who are buying homes are boomers. The people who show up to zoning meetings are overwhelmingly the people who benefit from supply restriction, which means showing up is genuinely high leverage. It is boring.

[00:25:57]It is the least cinematic thing you can do with a Tuesday evening. And it is approximately 10 times more impactful per unit of effort than any national political campaign you'll ever donate to. At the national level, you need millions of votes to move the needle. At the local level, you need to show up to a planning commission meeting with 50 other people who understand what the housing market is doing and vote in the municipal election that determines who sits on that commission. The vending machine at the local level still takes coins. It just takes fewer of them per unit of policy output. That's where your marginal coin is most powerful. Let me bring this back to where we started. A 24year-old doing everything right, hitting a wall. The wall is real. The system that built the wall is real. The politicians maintaining the wall are incentivized to keep it standing, not out of malice, but because the vending machine dispenses power to whoever inserts coins, and the coin insertters built the wall and live behind it comfortably. But here is what is also true. The people who understand the machine consistently outperform the people who are angry at the machine.

[00:27:00]Anger does not change the output of the vending machine. Understanding does. And then quietly, while the machine keeps dispensing for the same people it's been dispensing for since 1980, you start building your own system on the side.

[00:27:13]Lower overhead, more flexible, no politicians required. You build income that compounds. You acquire assets on whatever timeline the math actually allows, not the timeline you think you deserve. You insert coins strategically into the levels of the political machine where they actually matter. You stop waiting for the system to adapt to you and you adapt to the system, work around it and build something parallel to it.

[00:27:38]That's the move. That's always been the move for every generation that got dealt a rough hand. Gen X did it after the dot crash. Early millennials did it after 2008. Gen Z is doing it now quietly through side income and co- buying and REITs and local political organizing that never makes national news. The ones who figure this out early will be the ones who retire comfortable. The ones who wait for the vending machine to start serving them for free will wait a long time. If this kind of systems level thinking is useful to you, subscribe. I put out videos when I find patterns worth explaining.