Of course Reagan was not a Boomer. He just put the wheels on the bus and installed the power train to drive the deplorable things that some in this thread are blaming on Boomers. In other words, it is political philosophy and not age that drives things. Depending on outside events, many people of similar ages will derive their political views in similar fashions, but the generation wars are just silly.
More than anything I was tying Reagan to Trump for the sake of people like WillFarnaby who claim to hate Trump and love Reagan. But if Reagan himself wasn’t a boomer, his constituency definitely was.
That’s my take as well.
*“These changes occurred during the time when Boomers reached their maturity’ therefore, they’re responsible.”
*
That’s just sloppy and lacking rigor. Changes that actually take effect are probably the result of forces that are years in the making and they’re not some conspiracy of a generation that comes of age but rather a reaction to events that are occurring at the time and have probably percolated for some time.
Take the section of the article that addresses licensing. The author has a point in that licensing requirements have probably been excessively restrict in some instances, but they often come from the perceived need to regulate industry. And regulation of enterprise for the public good wasn’t a concept that Boomers conceived of - you could go back to the end of the 19th Century for that. But society as a whole has become more regulated, and the problem isn’t a conspiracy but an assumption by its proponents that regulation is always good and doesn’t have unintended consequences.
Not only that, but you have to look at the voting age demographics. In all the graphs he shows, things seem to have started changing in the late 1960s, and significantly accelerated around 1980 (Reagan election?) Who was actually doing most of the voting in the elections of the late 1960s through about the mid-1980s?
Was it the twenty-something/thirty-someting boomers? Doubtful, IMO. It was their parents- the “greatest generation”. The boomers didn’t really come into their own geezer power until the late 1990s/early 2000s. So we can pin stuff like the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, garbage like the Tea Party and a lot of the current woes we’re facing that is related to the way that the internet was handled w.r.t. political activity on them.
But I think the author of the article is expecting WAY too much out of that demographic to think they’d somehow recognize en-masse that the policies of their parents would end up being counterproductive to their grandchildren. If there’s anything I’ve learned by observing a quarter century or so of American politics and having read about the rest of it, is that it’s rarely forward-thinking beyond the next election cycle or two for that particular politician. None are thinking “Well, what legislation should I be thinking about for 2035” today; they’re focused on the here and now, and getting re-elected.
Even more so, it was a generation that is almost always left out of these discussions: the Silent Generation. This is the generation that were kids during WWII (hence too young to fight, so younger than the Greatest Generation), but older than the Baby boomers. They had their peak political power exactly during the Reagan Administration.
Clinton and Sanders would never have proposed the two-trillion dollar tax cut of 2017, and that goes right to the fiscal core of what you’re objecting to.
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Do you have any data about falling productivity? The Boomers I know are still often out-performing the next tier of workers. Someone driving spikes for a railroad is probably bested by a younger kid, but a programmer or a department manager is not. Some will slack, of course, just as some of every generation will.
More anti-generation tripe.
Just ran into this outraged letter to the editor from an aging millennial who thinks it’s high time he and his contemporaries took back the country from Boomers:
https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20190725/letter-dont-let-baby-boomers-shape-our-nations-future
I freely acknowledge ruining the country. I confess to getting a charge out of wearing my leather jacket with its prominent “Evilest Generation” patch to bars and clubs, and watching the millennials and Gen Xers scatter in panic.
But this letter has amped up the Evil to 11. Think of it - baby boomers routinely bought houses in their early 20s, but are now denying that privilege to millennials so that they can cash in on Medicare Part D.*
*which the writer apparently believes is a free government benefit lavished on seniors.
Again, I do not routinely hear Boomers bad-mouthing Millennials (or others). I see a lot of Millennials (or someone, usually with a need for attention), claiming that Boomers are bad-mouthing others. Some Boomers do it, the rest are just trying to get their kids through college while simultaneously supporting their aging parents and do not have the time or energy to whine as much as the faux Millennials ('cause I doubt that real Millennials are doing all this whining) claim.
Depending on how you define the demographic, my kids are either very young GenX or very old Millennials. They studied harder in high school than I did in college. Their tuition for one semester of college was more than mine for an entire four years. They were still stuck in entry-level jobs at the same age that I had already made a career change and gotten past entry level in that field. My Boomer wife has two Master’s degrees, but my GenX/Millennial son is working toward a PhD in molecular biology.
I don’t begrudge Millennials their complaints. OTOH, my Boomer wife and I both worked 60-hour weeks to make sure our kids had an economically stable, middle-class home in a house that was older and smaller than either of our parents lived in, and taught them to strive for more, and work their asses off to get it; so I do resent Millennials telling me how I fucked everything up for them.
I only look at the collective sentiment of millennials, written by a competent composer, and I find them interesting. You see, I find talking to them on a one-on-one basis a total waste of oxygen.
“So do you think the Apollo 11 mission was…”
Just about the most difficult question/challenge they threw to me was “Aw cmon, how could you make a computer back then without a computer?” To which I answered “Just like with abiogenesis, the formation of life from non-life is a physical possibility. It doesn’t violate the laws of nature. It’s just that the probability is very small.”