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Christopher Buckley's comic novel Boomsday describes a domestic war of economic interests between generations. (Just out in paperback, it's not his best--that would be Thank You for Smoking--but I highly recommend it nonetheless.) A young blogger, if you can call 29 young, was first primed to erupt when her father plundered her college fund to support his free-spending Boomer lifestyle. After further provocations, she calls on her fellow young workers to unite in rebellion against their parents' tireless self-indulgence.

An exhausted labor force answers the summons, crushed by the taxes needed to pay for the Boomers' ever-growing Social Security and Medicare bonanzas, and oppressed on every side by the new gray leisure class. The call goes out for suicide of the elderly ("voluntary transitioning") as the best way to lighten the fiscal burden.

The specter of conflict between the generations--cultural and political conflict, at any rate, if not an actual shooting war--is not so far-fetched. It is true, just as Buckley's angry blogger says, that government programs are preparing to transfer enormous and unprecedented amounts of wealth from young to old.

The number of people eligible to receive Social Security and Medicare is expanding rapidly as the Baby Boomers retire. The costs of Medicare, especially, are rising fast regardless of the number of beneficiaries. Thanks partly to expensive technology, people are living longer and succumbing to more-expensive illnesses. The economic base needed to support those transfers is growing only slowly. Also, comparatively speaking, the old are no longer as badly off, nor the young as well-off, as they used to be. The fact that the elderly are living longer, and expecting to live better, than their parents did aggravates both the fiscal problem and the potential for recrimination.

When they were at work, today's retiring Baby Boomers were paid much better than their parents before them (partly because the people in that middle generation were well educated). Their children aren't so fortunate. For today's young workers, who have slower-growing incomes, the chances of improving on--or even matching--the living standards that their parents enjoyed are diminishing.

On average, the educational attainment of the people now retiring from the workforce is higher than that of the youngsters joining it. Rates of graduation from high school have been falling for years; nowadays, lower proportions of young Americans go on to college than do their counterparts in many other advanced economies. Everything conspires to this end result: The young and productive are having to struggle more than their parents did to lift themselves up, whereas their parents, retired or about to retire, have never had it so good.

Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea of the Brookings Institution have just published an article, not quite as funny as Boomsday, that offers solutions to the problem that are perhaps a little more palatable than euthanasia. "It's time," they say, "to tear up the intergenerational contract and construct public policy around the one group of people for whom social investments really pay off: kids."

(The article, called "Old News," appears in the current issue of the journal Democracy. It is available on the Brookings website, Brookings.edu.)

The current contract, Sawhill and Monea say, was written in the 1930s when Social Security was born, revised in the 1960s with the addition of Medicare and Medicaid (which pays nursing home benefits), and then revised again in the current decade with passage of the prescription drug benefit.

The authors point out that this contract takes several things for granted: that workers will continue to retire at 65; that most seniors are too poor to support themselves in retirement or to pay for their own health care; and that younger Americans are, on average, better off than elderly Americans. Those assumptions, they argue, need to be challenged.

The poverty rate among the elderly (partly thanks to Social Security, of course) fell from 35 percent in 1959 to 9 percent in 2006. The poverty rate among working-age households is much higher, at 13 percent.

Some 80 percent of the elderly own their own homes, and three-quarters of those have paid off their mortgages. Social Security and Medicare have succeeded almost too well. The fiscal cost of that success keeps rising, and it is falling on working-age Americans who feel beleaguered--and who in many ways are worse off than the contract's beneficiaries.

Here's another way to look at it. Think about the wider progressive agenda that Sawhill and Monea are sympathetic to, and what it costs--a program that would include, among other things, wider access to health insurance for all Americans, and better education and training. The danger is that the growing burden of benefits for the elderly will crowd out these needed innovations by making them seem unaffordable.

"Those progressives who argue that the way to handle the needs of both groups is to raise taxes to a much higher level," the writers say, "seem to forget that the people who will pay those taxes are already struggling economically."

Actually, this is debatable. The burden of the federal income tax is skewed very sharply toward those with higher incomes, and in the aggregate the bottom 40 percent of taxpayers pay little. The payroll tax (which, nominally at least, finances the Social Security system) does, however, fall on the working poor--which is why presidential candidate Barack Obama's tax plans include a tax credit that would offset the payroll tax for the lowest-paid.

The fact remains that the progressives who want to keep Social Security and Medicare as generous as they are at present, if not more so, while expanding programs aimed at the working non-affluent, want to pay for it all with higher taxes on "the rich." The problem with this is not the one that Sawhill and Monea point to. It is that if you ask a narrow segment of the workforce to carry all of the burden, you have to push marginal tax rates too high--so high, that in the end they kill effort and initiative and become self-defeating. Having said that, the bottom line is still the same: There is a limit to what the country can afford.

Hence the need for a new intergenerational contract. Sawhill and Monea make some specific recommendations and suggest some broader principles to guide the renegotiation.

As far as specific policies are concerned, possibilities include raising the retirement age and indexing it to longevity; curbing the growth of benefits for affluent seniors; encouraging or requiring working-age households to save more for retirement (for instance, by creating an automatic individual retirement account program); and imposing a global cap on Medicare outlays in place of the limitless fee-for-service system. The country could spend the savings on providing universal pre-K education (studies show that this is one of the most cost-effective educational investments any nation can make), or on increasing access to health insurance, or on broadening work supports such as child care.

Two of the general principles seem to me especially important.

First, spending on the young can be an "investment" in a way that spending on the elderly cannot. If you improve the education of young Americans, the returns in terms of higher incomes in later years can more than pay for the initial outlay. If the new contract were phased in slowly, the change would not be a matter of taking resources from one group to give to another. It would be investing more in today's young people in exchange for their commitment to meet more of their own needs later in retirement--a good deal for them, provided that the investments were smart and therefore paid off.

In theory, this is hard to quarrel with, but is such a strategy politically feasible? Unfortunately, I doubt it. To get the biggest benefits and to manage a smooth transition from old contract to new would require commitment to a long-term plan of action. When was that last achieved? (Don't suggest the space program: The politics of that was child's play compared with this.) Any such thing seems far outside Washington's competence. The best one can hope for might be piecemeal changes--of the sort advocated by Sawhill and Monea, to be sure, each with some attraction on its merits, each with some hope of political traction--that taken together push in the right direction.

Another of their guiding principles is not just important, and wonderfully simple, but also especially problematic in the world of politics. "There is no reason," Sawhill and Monea say, "to favor the old over the young, especially if we are comparing affluent seniors with low-income families or their children." I agree, of course, but tell that to AARP--39 million members and counting. The political power of "wrinklies," as the Boomsday blogger calls them, is already great and is bound to grow. Their pressure group, one of the most formidable in the country, turned 50 on July 1 and has never felt fitter.