In Washington State, Puget Sound Energy is a for-profit utility owned by mostly pension plans! Their guaranteed ROI is sucked out of the productive economy. Everywhere you look rent is being extracted either by the 0.01% or the elderly, and the working class must slave to get 1/10 what they gave themselves.
Not an economist but I don't see how money can be anything other than an accounting tool at that level. If they had "paid for it" back in the day, young people would still be screwed.
The two big ways to increase prosperity that I see are for people to take care of their health so they need fewer medical services, and for fewer people to be devoted to administration (e.g. the medical billing quagmire, SaaS companies focused on how to better extract rent) or convincing people to buy stupid crap (c.f. the giant advertising industry that swallows up bright workers to build a surveillance and propaganda apparatus instead of e.g. industrial automation), fewer pointless wars, and more people devoted to actually doing things people need or building infrastructure (e.g. solar).
The problem isn't that there are old people, is that there's currently a glut of old people, which puts real strain on the system. Being old is expensive for governments. Not only do older people not typically pay nearly as much in taxes, they also require more resources to support.
So many of today's problems come down to the simple demographic fact: there's a lot of baby boomers, and they're getting old.
In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.
Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.
This line of logic doesn't follow. There's plenty of old people who need to move out for non-financial reasons (e.g. can't live independently anymore), and it doesn't really make sense to me that having to move out because you can't afford your mortgage is okay while not being able to afford your taxes isn't. In any case, we can have our cake and eat it too by building more housing. Homes become affordable for young people if supply increases and the tax base broadens enough that taxes go down for established homeowners.
Thus, you can budget around the mortgage payment in a predictable way, and if you have to move out because you can no longer afford it, that's a very different thing than if your property taxes magically change because a theoretical buyer may theoretically be willing to pay some astronomically higher cost for your house than you paid for it.
So, respectfully, I disagree with the framing that we have to take both or neither. They are separate budgeting concerns, and separate policy concerns.
Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.
They're also economically and socially viable participants in the community.
I don't think people really understand how bad it is out here. I imagine that if a dignified line on the base standard were held, there would be less of a need for this kind of middle-class pearl-clutching.
Y2K: buy an 1/8th of a million dollar house. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $1.25M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate is 0.8%, that is ... numerically correct but its mere numerology.
2026: house is now worth 1/2 of a million dollars. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $5M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate historically was 0.8%, then you'd have to pay $4K/yr, but it doesn't even remotely work that way, so it simply doesn't matter. Its just numerology. My fraction of total property ownership "value" times the annual village budget is what I'll be taxed, which in this case is the same old $1K.
In reality grandma gets kicked to the street because inflation raises the price of everything, including real estate, but real estate is not even remotely the problem or the solution. Grandma might have afforded a house and its taxes when a McDonalds Big Mac was 75 cents each but now that its $13.49 the village budget has gone up 10x, 20x what it was when she bought, so she better find a way to make 10x, 20x more money or not only is she not going to pay her fair share of the budget via taxes, she's not going to eat food either.
"Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable." Thats the real problem. No one can move in and pay the city budget, and the city budget explodes because now they have to pay the dog catcher at least $250K/yr to live there and nobody can afford to rob peter to pay paul quite that much...