I’m a Boomer. How did I rack up huge government debt?
And Btw, I have a nice retirement fund.
Yeah, like the three major tax cuts (2001, 2003, 2017) so far this century. Bipartisan! Or spending trillions on a totally unnecessary war in Iraq. Bipartisan!
Sure, too many Dems went along with the Iraq war, and with the huge defense budget increases in the past few years. But the push came from the GOP, all you can really say about the Dems is that they had (and continue to have) no backbones. They didn’t make those things happen; the Republicans did.
The World War II generation ran the country beginning with the Congressional elections in 1946 and Eisenhower in 1952, right up until George H.W. Bush left office in 1993. That’s more than 40 years.
Baby boomers haven’t even run the country for 30 years yet.
Cognitive dissonance on the part of US conservatives has apparently reached the breaking point. Their only way out of continuing to avoid the realization of what shitty things their ideology has done to this country is to try to reframe the problems as generational instead of ideological.
Wow, there’s a blast from the past for you: I remember the conservative ad campaigns pitching exactly that same “Social Security won’t be there for you when you retire” spiel to younger Boomers around 1995 and to Gen-Xers around 2005.
Kiddo, the influential wealthy conservatives behind these ad campaigns want you to believe that Social Security won’t exist when you’re retired, because they want you to vote for Social Security privatization, which will move hundreds of billions of dollars into private investment, which will massively increase the value of their own assets, which will make them lots of money. They do not give one rat’s ass about whether your non-guaranteed-benefit privatized retirement plan will destroy your savings in a market downturn, or about what happens to you in case of such a catastrophe.
Don’t like the massive hollowing out of the economy and environmental destruction engineered by conservatives over the last fifty years or so? Well then, vote for a Democrat, or a Democratic Socialist. Or, if you don’t want to face up to the damage that your ideology has caused, just keep on whining about old people in general.
I’m getting the feeling that the ‘solution’ for Baby Boomer retirement is going to involve ice floes.
CMC fnord!
Nah, it’s just part of the increasingly desperate efforts by American conservatives to avoid facing up to their responsibility for decades of shitty policies and irresponsible leadership. “It’s all the fault of the old people, let’s kill all the old people!” is just the latest attempt at political deflection.
Look at the craven weaseling all through the OP’s linked article:
Largely due to “law and order” conservatives ostentatiously getting “tough on crime” with harsh (and expensive) sentencing for nonviolent offenders.
Largely due to anti-tax conservatives whittling away at education spending, and the conservative tilt of economic benefits towards the wealthy.
Largely because conservatives refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and beat the drum for some hideously expensive unnecessary wars.
Largely because, again, conservatives were vehemently opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy, even as the wealthy constantly increased their disproportionate amounts of income and wealth.
What’s more interesting than this dishonest litany of conservative whining is the question of exactly what they’re trying to sell the public this time. ISTM that Republicans are finally recognizing that their Trump/Pence/McConnell-era establishment is rapidly losing all credibility, and that some serious economic/environmental austerity measures are inevitable, despite their decades of insouciantly assuring their constituents that all the concerns are just Democratic “fearmongering” and “socialism”.
Their best hope, as the elderly Republican establishment collapses under its own weight of petty obstructionism and greed, is to try to take the elderly Democratic establishment down with it. Solution: point the finger at all the old people together, and never never mention any specific conservative as being to blame for something.
But what do they expect to get out of it in the long run? Are there any particular younger-generation Republicans, or maybe Post-Republicans, whom they expect to win the voters over once they’ve persuaded them that all the conservative folly and stupidity was just a generic geriatric thing?
The next generations can right this ship but they won’t do it by voting Republican. GOP governance is why we’re here in the first place.
I’ve been on this board for almost twenty years and cannot recall an OP with as assinine a proposition that has generated so many well-intentioned responses.
To continue to respond to it gives its premise - that ‘baby boomers’ have somehow ruined the country - a credibility that is not just undeserved but bizarre. It’s the old ‘have you stopped beating your wife’.
Hey Will, have you stopped beating your wife?
Regardless of how you view the participation of baby boomers in national / social politics over the decades, I think I can reasonably promise you that we will not be messing things up any further after 2079.
So the answer to your question is “yes”.
No. The answer is no. Not until we die. (well not me personally, I’m an economic under-achiever who basically just tries to get along) but my generation— pretty much isn’t going to let go of the shit show we created until we’ve extracted every cancerous, heavy-metal-laden dollar.
::record scratch::
My what?
You seem to be very America-centric, and have whole-heartedly bought into marketing based demographic ideas like “baby boomers.”
Maybe read this: Strauss–Howe generational theory - Wikipedia
and ask yourself why “Strauss-Howe generational theory has been described by some historians and journalists as a “pseudoscience”[9][10][11] and “an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny.”[12][13][14]”
No single person has much control of the world. People often can’t control themselves, much less their children, their neighbors, their political party, their country. Life is frustrating, and it will always be so.
I told them at the last secret meeting that they were on to us! OK, here’s the deal. All you Baby Boomers have to immediately go underground – burn your birth certificates, get facial reconstruction surgery (I mean from our secret GOOD plastic surgeons, only available to members of our secret society). Oh and that secret conspiracy to ruin America – put it on hold until we can purge all the databases of our true birthdates.
No really, I’m definitely not a baby boomer. Look, you can tell because that grey hair is clearly artificial.
here’s another irritating thing Boomers do, complain about their Millennial kids. Hey, maybe if you don’t like the way your kids turned out, look in a mirror to get an idea why that might be. but that would mean admitting you made a mistake; much easier to shift blame.
that’s one thing that truly has changed, families in general seem to be a lot smaller. I’m late Gen X (42) and anecdotally looking through stuff from both sides of my families’ histories, it seems like:
- my great-grandparents generation: families had 5-7 kids
- my grandparents generation: families had 3-5 kids
- my parents generation: families had 2-3 kids
- my generation: families have 1-2 kids
- the next (millennials): 0-1 kids
Christmas used to mean going to Grandma and Grandpa’s where my 4-5 aunts/uncles and their spouses were their with my 5-6 cousins or so. Christmas now is at my parents’, where it’s just a handful of us because we don’t have any kids.
American mobility vaporized the family unit, and that started in the 1920s. I never had a big family Christmas, because one set of grandparents was in Chicago, the other set was in the Ozarks. My father and his three siblings lived from Florida to California, my mother’s siblings lived a little closer together, but six of them had moved away from my grandparents because they had worked they were old enough to walk, and wanted no more of that as adults. And the only time my grandparents left their little farm that they had lost and bought back more times than my mother could remember was to go to the big city for doctors’ appointments.
Now, two of my three kids live 300 miles away, with their own friends and their own obligations. The only time all five of us are together is either a wedding or a funeral.
Taxes will hover around 18% in perpetuity. Taxes are a red herring. It is spending that is increasing at an unsustainable pace and yes big spending is bipartisan. The Dems show no interest in cutting anything. They threw a fit when Romney wanted to cancel Sesame Street. There is no federal spending that the Dems will lay a finger on, including military spending.
yet it’s the Republicans who think we need a military equipped to fight WWII all over again by ourselves…
they decry “socialism” but have turned the military into the biggest jobs program imaginable.
My response was obviously a joke, reflecting back on the OP the same idiotic generalization about generations.
How could you not have gotten that? Are you a Millennial?
Sounds like you are trying to make yourself feel better. To suggest Democrats do not favor high military spending is to deny 90 years of history. I’ll leave you to it.