The study looks at "education, social security and medicare." The authors "calculate the net present value for each program and each birth cohort as the differencew between the lifetime discounted, survival-weighted benefits and the discounted, surival-weighted tax payments."<p>They find that "a typical elderly person of today was born seventy years ago, in 1934, and experienced a net loss of about one percent of life time earnings," inasmuch as they likely didn't get any public education but paid for plenty of it, "while a baby born today is projected to realize a net gain of 5%!" They also find that "every single generation alive today, even those just born, would gain from raising taxes! Those who would gain the most are the generations between age 20 and 60 in 2004...these gains come at a great loss to later generations, with those born in 2090 losing 12% of their life time earnings relative to the benefit-cut option, and with proportionate losses continuing to grow rapidly thereafter."<p>Potently, "for generations born after 2052, the NPVs turn increasingly negative, with no end in sight to the trend." Of course, there is more to the tax code than those three items. But they're the big intergernational ones. (They "assume that education was paid for by property taxes," which might explain why the word "college" or "student loans" doesn't appear in the text once.)