Gen X’ers?
Has all the answers or thinks they have all the answers?!
When they realize their folly they will be the one’s ‘ruining the country’.
CMC fnord!
The American Enterprise Institute has taken the wrong position on everything since the day they were founded. They are as reliable an information source as The Onion.
This late boomer didn’t vote for Trump - but knows a disturbing number of millennials who didn’t vote at all because Bernie didn’t get the nomination.
And BTW, millennials don’t strike me as any less apt to be selfish when they get into power than the baby boomers are - for every one who complains about the increase in housing prices, there’s another who contributes to it by raising the rent in gentrifying neighborhoods without any concern for the people who will priced out of their neighborhood.
The Boomer screwing of America did not begin with Trump, nor would it have abated with Clinton or Sanders. They all three agree on the Boomer consensus I outlined above.
That was a rhetorical question. I’ll settle for being recognized before claiming to have all the answers.
From the quoted article:
[
](The Boomers Are to Blame for Aging America - The Atlantic)
So, basically, what this thread is doing is taking the words of a libertarian think tank and acting as though they should decide what is good for the country. (And so far, the idea that “Boomers” were responsible for this mess has not been established. There is a vague reference to “older” people blithely conflated with “Boomers” without actually demonstrating that the Boomers were the ones responsible.)
Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump are all Boomers and the country did different things under each of them.
The destruction of the Middle Class began (or was significantly advanced) under Reagan at a time when Congress was still dominated by the “Greatest Generation” and their pre-Boomer successors.
Setting up generational wars was stupid when a bunch of Boomers were chanting “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”–a phrase coined by a pre-Boomer–and it is stupid, today.
meh
The more things change the more they stay the same as they always have been.
I’m going to assuming that holding my breath while waiting for the brilliant answers to all the worlds problems is a bad idea.
CMC fnord!
As a liberal Boomer who has voted for only two successful presidential candidates in my lifetime (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), I am very happy to learn that all of the problems of the country are about to be solved as the next generation takes over. I’m also sure that in 50 years, there won’t be any young people writing articles about how the country was destroyed by the previous generation. [/sarcasm]
One of my values as a liberal is tolerance. That includes not judging a group of people based on their race, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or age. The bigotry that assumes that everyone in the same age cohort thinks and behaves the same can be just as destructive as other types of bigotry, whether it is applied to the young or the old.
Whoo boy. Gen Z here.
As a person growing up in the modern age and acting as the future, its quite terrifying to think that people will blame the generations of the past, present, and future for the issues of today.
To be honest, this has been a founding issue of the United States leading all the way back to Hamilton and Thomas. Such political issues have continued to force political parties on those who never even wanted them. As I am getting ready for my first election this year, I am voting for what I believe in. Not on age, political party, race, gender, or sexuality.
If anyone is to blame, look for the big movers and shakers in the white, evangelical movements, the business workers on wall street, and the holy roller baptists of the south.
Indeed. I sometimes get the AEI and the Competitive Enterprise Institute mixed up. The difference is that AEI tends to be wrong about everything, whereas the CEI tends to be viciously malignant in their disinformation. When Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie came out and started raising awareness about climate change, CEI ran a series of TV ads literally promoting CO2. I’m not joking. One of the ads featured a little girl with a daisy, and the tagline was “CO2: They call it pollution. We call it life.”
So if the country is going to hell in a handbasket, the environment is getting trashed while the super-rich get richer and the middle class increasingly gets left behind as the wealth gap widens, maybe the kid who wrote that article should look at the disproportionate influence of a certain lunatic ideology on this state of affairs – namely his own – instead of indiscriminately blaming baby boomers.
I read the article. It has a lot of graphs for purposes of decoration. It sums up by saying:
So basically what he has is a collection of social and governmental changes, some of which happened while Boomers were alive and of an age to vote. Not a word about the reason for any of the changes, or what would have happened if the changes hadn’t been made, and the connection of the changes he lists to the bad results he lists is shaky. It reminds me of antivaxxers who are just sure that those vaccines caused that autism because it looked like they happened at the same time.
As an example, at the city/county level, zoning and permitting (two different things) are mostly about using taxes and fees to keep things equitable and manageable. Different land uses have different effects on infrastructure, traffic, and the use of various services (parks, schools, fire, police, parking, etc.) If a new development, industrial plant, or apartment building will cause the city and county increases in X, Y, and Z, that had better be dealt with both up front and on an ongoing basis. If your local zoning is having a bad effect on something you care about, get involved in local government. That’s much easier to do than getting involved in state and federal government.
For the purpose of decorating this post, I submit this graph. Quite a lot of the social and governmental changes that have been made in the last fifty years were influenced by the increase in the population. The writer does not mention population at all and appears to be unaware of this influence. This does not inspire confidence.
I would have expected the article to conclude with a call to action. It does not. The reader is instead encouraged to . . . feel bad?
Regular people, like you, Reader, are powerless. Only leaders can make changes. Feel bad. Maybe grouse a little.
No, feel really bad. Old people are poopy-heads, who won’t change things for you, so you may as well just die. (Seriously, that graph on your increased odds of dying was supposed to be a hint.)
It is a truism that old people complain about the young and the young whine about the old. Both have points to make but in this case the old have a better argument.
The economy is as good as it has ever been. Most young people have never known a sustained period of inflation, recessions are fewer are more far between, unemployment is below what used to be thought possible.
Ecologically the environment is good and getting better, the air is cleaner and so is the water. My father grew up in a town where you had to sweep up the pollution from the local mill off of your porch every morning. Global warming may one day make life harder but it has not yet and people are researching ways to stop it and they might succeed.
The foreign enemies are crazy people in small, poor countries, not huge evil empires like the USSR or Nazi germany.
The problems such as government debt and zoning making housing unaffordable are caused by selfishness but selfishness is not exclusive to baby boomers, millenials want low taxes and high government spending and they want their homes to appreciate in value.
To be fair, there are a lot of problems that have been caused by the Baby Boomers. Ironically, they tend to be the very same problems that Boomers are most likely to complain about. Take the secularization of Christmas, for instance: It’s because the Boomers are such a large generation, that they never had to grow up. What Christmas means for children is what Christmas continued to mean, as the Boomers grew up, because they were a large market to pander to. And so now they complain about how their families don’t do any of the things that families did when they were growing up, oblivious to the fact that they were supposed to be the ones making those things happen, because they were now the adults. Or the whole bit about “When I was a kid, everyone in the neighborhood knew each other, and it’s not like that any more”. If you don’t like it, then go out and meet your neighbors. Your parents did.
Please. The secularization of Christmas was well under way before any of the Boomers were born.
What most of the accusations against Boomers say, in fact, is “I know nothing about history.”
I’m not going to say that Boomers learned better history than younger generations. They probably got worse history, because it was all sugar-coated American wonderfulness with no depth or nuance. I didn’t discover real U.S. history until I read a college-level textbook in an AP American History class. Changed everything I thought I knew.
But some of this idiocy is practically current events. Moreover, the accusations seem to assume that the Boomers were in charge from the moment the first ones were born. Boomers had very little power in the 50s, 60s, 70, and 80s, and were just coming into positions of power in the 90s and 00s, when most of the power elite were still much older than the Boomers. (The youngest Boomers were still in their 30s in 2001, the same age that Millennials are today. You know, the ones that are complaining about their lack of power.)
Get your facts straight. Then we can talk about who is to blame for what when.
It’s pretty bizarre to me that the gist of your defenses seem to be “Oh come on, we’ve only had political power for 30 years.” The youngest Boomer became a voter in 1980. That was almost 40 years ago. Don’t tell me you just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
The rest of the excuses amount to “but our parents did the same thing. We’re just doing it more.” You really think you can just point at the Greatest Generation, say they were overdrawing Social Security too, and call it a day? In 2000, there were 3.4 workers per retiree. Just 13 years later, and it’s down to 2.8! Don’t act like that’s just a rounding error. It’s projected to keep falling.
And that problem is already too late to fix without cutting benefits. There’s no way to make the Boomers start working again so they can pay more taxes, so the only solution is to cut off the tap, reducing benefits by 30% or so. (Boomers, this is your cue to propose lifting the SS tax cap so that young people can just pay more tax! Problem solved!)
Naturally, Boomers managed to squander the best economy in US history by saving absolutely nothing for retirement, so now it’s impossible to do that. Leaving the only real solution is killing Social Security right as Millennials are set to retire. Pay in for 40 years, get nothing in return. Fuck. That.
I’m not even going to address the “Eh, whaddayagunna doaboudit” responses.
As someone for whom Christmas was, and remains, very precious, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. My wonderful childhood memories of Christmas were always basically secular celebratory things; it was never about religion in any explicit way, though I certainly understood the meaning of the holiday and at least half the Christmas songs were religious, as they still are today. As I grew into adulthood Christmas continued to be a very special occasion but the focus changed from excitement about Santa and presents to looking forward to the reunion of family and friends, and to giving rather than receiving. For various practical reasons Christmas is not as big an occasion now as it once was, but that’s not my doing, and it makes me sad. I do my best to keep up the tradition.
I think that Chronos is trying to get at something I’ve noticed as well - I’ve been in more than one conversation with adults who are nostalgic for the Christmases and other holidays of their childhood. They’ll go on and on about how all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered at grandma’s for Christmas or at Uncle Joe’s for the big July 4th BBQ. And then they sadly say " “But now it’s only me, my parents ,my siblings and our kids.” Or “Our kids, our grandchildren and us”. And they don’t even realize that the only thing that changed was that they grew up and are now in the position that their parents/grandparents were in when they were kids. All the aunts and uncles and cousins- to Grandma, that was her kids and grandchildren. Uncle Joe used to have the BBQ- now it’s time for someone younger to take over. I don’t know if Boomers do it more, or if I was just too young to hear the previous generations making the same complaints.
A lot of us boomers are saying “we” don’t feel like we’ve had this “political power” you’re talking about. We’re not a political party. A great many of “us”want what you want, but a collation of voters comprised of people older, younger, and our age group, have outvoted us in sufficient numbers to cause some serious problems and prevent progress. What would you suggest we do?
The youngest millennial became a voter five years ago. The youngest Generation Xer became a voter 21 years ago. Eactly why haven’t they reversed all these horrors since it’s so easy to do?
Really?!? People are living longer than they used to?!? Wow!!!
What’s your point? That we should kill off people when they reach age 70? Or are you under the delusion that the Boomers were responsible for the destruction of American manufacturing, the collapse of the Rust Belt cities, the white flight from city centers, suburban sprawl, air pollution, and the growth of low-paying service jobs? Sorry, no. All that fell under the so-called Greatest Generation. The Boomers are the ones who paid for those sins. Did you think that jobs were handed out like candy to Boomers? I went through a series of horrible job markets much worse than anything today.
I’ve been arguing for decades that SS should be taken out of all wages no matter how high. It’s the only sane way to make the wealthy pay a fraction of their fair share. Cap benefits, not taxes. And who are all those millennials who will be hurt by this? You seem to be looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
When was this best economy? State your case. Additionally, Boomers are certainly better at savings than any younger cohort. The retirement problem can be entirely laid at the feet of the Greatest Generation. They negotiated early retirement and high pensions without any thought to how anyone could pay those in the future. They did so in the 1950s, when the U.S. owned the only functional economy in the world and lifetime employment by one giant manufacturing corporation was deemed to be the norm forever. This was obvious insanity and started falling apart just about the time when the Boomers were of the ages that their parents were then. For the consequences, see above.
As for Social Security, it will not be killed, now or 40 years from now. There are many fixes, starting with higher taxes on the wealthy and proceeding to payments starting later to recognize that people live much longer. A better health care system will reduce medical costs, which are a huge burden on the elderly. More regulation on corporations to prevent the enormous abuses of workers, especially in the gig economy that delusional youngsters seem to favor - will leave current workers in better shape when they get older. All of this is beside the basic fact that SS was never intended to be the sole income of the elderly, but just an additional benefit to make retirement easier. This history is - or should be - known to everyone. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.
No need. I’m telling you what we can and should do about it. Step one. Get all Republicans out of office. Step Two. Implement the sensible changes I’ve mentioned.