heres the link : MSN
One of a few times msn its self put a “we neither agree with or responsible for this article” tags before the article…
All I can say is wow …this guy believes no ones been innocent since 1945 and I think hes about 60 percent full of shit but he does make a point here and there …
I’m not sure how much stock I can put into someone who thinks Americas “shocking decline” is related to how many people we put on the moon lately.
Can’t wait for the article on Millennials …
The postwar booms - children, productivity and economic - are directly at fault for many of our problems today. Instead of being seen as bubbles or bulges or anomalies, they were enshrined as the new normal, so when we fell away from them, it was a series of national crises and endless efforts to “restore” things or prop up failing industrial/economic/educational models. Its’ still being done by politicians who point to ca. 1955 as the good old days we need to get back to.
1957
Not least because they’re 81 and 76 and in no way boomers.
The rest of the article lives up to that standard.
From the article: “So what if Social Security faces partial insolvency after 2034?”
I would remind the author that the crux of the Reagan/O’Neil deal on Social Security reached in the eighties, just as many mid-range boomers were either just entering the workforce or were in their lower wage-earning years, was that boomers would not, as had been the case in the past, finance merely the retirement of the previous generation of Social Security recipients, but their own retirement as well.
Any difficulties, real or imagined, facing the social security trust fund are not the fault of the generation that has, essentially, paid double in FICA over most of the course of their working lifetimes.
That does also cut into one’s ability to save.
Also the article says that the most prominent Boomer of recent times, Barack Obama, is an exception to his thesis. Just because.
It really doesn’t make a lot of sense. As Exapno Mapcase said, I don’t think he even knows when the Baby Boom was. He just wants to complain about old people.
If you want to go back to the way things were in 1955, you’ve got to pay the bill. Space programs aren’t cheap. Don’t forget that in 1955 the top marginal income tax rate was 91%.
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meh
Another X-generation (cusp millennial) hedge fund manager trying to find someone to “blame” because the world is not like he wants it to be.
Generational warfare is no more intelligent (or factual) than class warfare.
Well, if we can’t generationally generalize, who will we blame for everything?
Thankfully, they’re putting computer chips in all the AARP membership cards now*, so we can track boomers as they move into similarly destructive retirement.
*I saw it on The Simpsons.
We can’t go back to 1955 (or 1957) by changing tax rates. It was an unprecedented combination of global economic issues unlikely to be repeated. There’s nothing wrong with the postwar boom, other than the fixed notion that it represented normality and we have somehow fallen from its heights because we screwed up.
I getting tired of taking the blame for my parent’s greed. Those of us who were born in the 40s and 50s were not making policy decisions then. It was our parents, the so called ‘Greatest generation’ who awarded themselves with social security and Medicare and passed the bill along to their children. Now, after a lifetime of paying into the systems to support that generation, we find ourselves at the point where we would like to get something back. Instead we find the old folks have consumed most of what we gave them and left a note in the empty cupboard that says: ‘Off to our afternoon golf match. Send more money and put it on your children’s tab.’
Our kids have good reason to not want to pay into that system. Boomers will never have the retirements and medical care that our parents enjoy now and our children even less so unless we take more serious cuts.
I’m sure he has a picture of Obama putting sugar on his porridge to back up his argument.
Of course there is huge variation among boomer people, and even the generational date boundaries are very fuzzy. And it’s silly to encourage one generation to blame another.
Nevertheless I wonder if there’s some truth in these generalities. Without the Depression and Great War to teach suffering, but with huge increases in prosperity and technology it seems quite logical that “Boomers” would develop very different psychology and moral outlook from their parents. And, without the hope of life-time employment and a safety net, the “Millenials” naturally have their own different outlook.
Such questions have come up at SDMB before. Are there good books or scholarly essays that address this matter?
It was me, I tell you! I, all by myself,** I** destroyed everything!
No way I’m letting my fellow Boomers share in the credit. It was my doing, all mine!!
Seriously, he hits some of our old friends: “America has suffered a shocking decline.” “Boomers…were the first generation to be raised permissively.” Ah yes, permissiveness, that old bogeyman.
Then he finds new bogeymen: we’re all (well, not all, he eventually admits, just more than enough of us) sociopaths, a word he employs variations on no fewer than eight times in the article. How does this evidence itself? In such things as a low level of savings and a high level of bankruptcies. Sociopathy apparently isn’t what it used to be, is all I can say. (That must be our fault too!)
In short: Lord, what a crock. Someone actually gave op-ed space to this crap?
I didn’t read the article and would like to be corrected, but from everything I’ve seen doing my own research, the income tax rates, and capitol gains tax rates seem to drop at the perfect time to benefit boomers. The amounts going toward funding education seem to drop just when boomers don’t need it as much.
Well, the good news is that boomers are starting to die off. As the millenials come of age and become our political, economic and cultural leaders, I’m sure that they will usher in a new era of prosperity and political unity. By 2050 the U.S. should once again be a paradise on earth.
Just remember, however, that the millennials are mostly the boomers’ kids. I’m sure their attitudes won’t in any way influence their offspring.
Getting back to the link in the OP, even though I often have an interest in articles like this, I try not to mistake them for serious analysis because I think tagging an age group that spans nearly 20 years with a set of narrow stereotypes constitutes shallow thinking and leads people into further dividing themselves into phony “us versus them” groups. That said, I have noticed that two generational tracks seem to have developed in U.S. One track consists of the “Greatest Generation” (i.e., people who came of age during the Depression and fought in WWII); their children, the Baby Boomers (i.e., people born from 1946 to 1964); and the Boomer’s kids, the Millennials (who are now taking control of society). The second track consists of the so-called “Silent Generation” (i.e., people born during the Depression and WWII); their children, Generation X (i.e., people born from 1965 to about 1980): and offspring of Generation X (who are mostly too young to have much of a social influence). The generations in the first track were and are larger, richer, and are considered to have more of a cultural impact than the generations in the second track thereby creating a source of potential tension between the two tracks. (However, I should emphasize this analysis is based on my superficial observation and probably wouldn’t stand up if subjected to deeper study.)
And when you talk about individual people and families, it’s all mixed up. My parents are from the Silent Generation. My sister and I are both late Baby Boomers. Her daughter is a Millennial. My son, born in 2009, is whatever comes after the Millennials, if it has a name.