It’s pretty clearly laid out here that Baby Boomers are the worst thing to happen to America since…well, maybe ever. When they’re not being racist and protectionist, they’re raiding the public treasury for themselves and providing nothing of value in return.
And the worst sin of them all is their intransigence toward fixing absolutely anything at all. We know the climate is doomed, and we could’ve stopped it, but Baby Boomers refused to do so. They’ll be dead by the time it matters (hopefully). We all know social programs are unsustainable at current levels, but it’s been decades of silence from the Worst Generation. They’ve elected Trump, and with it, a fiscal disaster of a tax cut and a doomed Supreme Court composition that will entrench their terrible life philosophies until long after they’ve done the right thing and keeled over.
So my question is whether the Baby Boomers will ever look in the mirror, see what a miserable group they collectively are, and try to right the ship, or will rigor mortis set in with them still flipping off the rest of us who have to clean up their financial, moral, and ecological disasters?
I skimmed the article and couldn’t figure out why baby boomers were blamed for the policy provisions the author complains about. I would guess a variety of voters of all ages had a role.
Am sure the Millenials can thunk out all the solutions, technical, environmental, financial and moral, and they’ll get cracking on them just as soon as they work out the hack to beat level 97 of Candy Crush.
Bizarre article. I certainly agree that there are many problems. I don’t see any evidence presented that it is specifically the Baby Boomers’ fault. Anecdotally, I am a late Boomer, and most of the people I know well are fairly liberal, and certainly did not vote for Trump.
IMHO it is highly irrational to assign blame by generation. I’d be happy to blame Republican voters, and the “Boomers” have more than their share of those, but if you want to blame an entire group because of the political views of some of them, White Evangelicals vote GOP much more strongly than Boomers, so would be a better target. Or White Racists.
It’s true that there has been a ferocious transfer of wealth and income from young workers and future generations to well-off Americans; that the benefits tend to accrue to the elderly is a natural result of demographics, not generational warfare. There are plenty of poor senior citizens struggling to meet healthcare costs even with Medicare. Jared Kushner and people like Martin Shkreli are beneficiaries of the kleptocracy; are they Boomers?
The Atlantic article was written by a right-winger who has a rather bizarre view of American socio-economics. He especially attacks “liberal” programs like licensing or zoning.
BTW, halfway down the page are interesting graphs — “Average Household Income per Person [by education]” and “Share of Population Incarcerated” — both graphs associate the problems with the 1980’s and 1990’s, a period when the Greatest Generation, rather than the Boomers, was more in control. Yes, the D’s had the White House for 8 years during that period but were stymied by GOP filibuster … GOPsters elected by the Greatest Generation.
The Boomer has amassed more debt, public and private, than any generation preceding him. This despite relative peace and unprecedentedly favorable economic conditions. Perhaps the Boomer’s later economic solipsism was a response to his counter-cultural infatuation with failed authoritarian states.
The Boomer has incarcerated more people than any generation before, and most likely after, his tough-on-crime copper infatuation. Perhaps the Boomer, having come of age during a counter-cultural peak, wanted to exact some control over society and used the state to accomplish it.
The Boomer participated in the most failed marriages of any generation before, and most likely after his selfish and unstable indulgences. His or her inability to control the actions of his or her spouse was apparently a dealbreaker, though they succeeded in helicopter controlling their poor millennial children to the point of lifelong handicap.
The Boomer will be the recipient of more transfer payments and welfare benefits per capita(in real terms) than any generation in American history. This because they failed to reform Social Security and Medicare by adjusting for modern facts of life.
The Boomers orchestrated insane increases in housing costs(zoning and NIMBY pioneers they were). The Boomers caked billions off of insane increases in higher ed(student loan and administrative cost trailblazers they were). The Boomers will retire comfortably on their utter assault on efficiency in healthcare (medicare, licensing and insurance mandate innovators they were).
So not only did the Boomer destroy our economic system and exploit our political system, he also corrupted civil society and the American family. The pile of evidence is mountainous. Now he wants us to be more comfortable with socialism. Yes this resurgence in socialism is playing out very nicely for the Boomer as he gets set to become a de-facto ward of the state in his senior years. When will the youngsters realize this vast transfer of wealth taking place already? When will the younger generations turn on the geriatric welfare queens and kings? Will it be ugly?
What I get out of that article is that the baby boomers’ kids (or in some cases, grandkids) are now out of their diapers and some of them are eking out a living writing opinion pieces about how their parents ruined the country.
Kid who wrote that article got his BA in 2013, so is probably in his late 20s. This is about the age where you know everything and have the solution to all problems. And some of his complaints suggest that he really is confusing “baby boomers” with “Republicans”. As a member of the American Enterprise Institute, he may be living in a bubble where he’s not even aware that there’s a whole other political faction in America.
I can see the point however I’d like to also point out they were doing the same about 20 years ago with the then retiring depression era generation pointing out they were getting social security way above and beyond what they had paid into it.
I’d like to ask, what is the writers purpose for this? Does he think that baby boomers are suddenly going to feel sorry for their actions and are going to raise taxes on themselves or something?