Again, this characterizing a cohort born between a certain span of years as one thing is not only ‘lazy thinking’ as you say, but just incorrect. If you were born in 1948, you grew up with Elvis and the JFK assassination and, if male, Vietnam, either as part of the war or surrounded by it. If you were born in 1963, you had none of that. You grew up with disco and Devo, Star Wars (movies) and Star Wars (political). If you were born in 1965, your formative experiences were similar to this, but if you were born in 1979, they were much different, yet 1965 and 1979 are also a “generation.”
It’s so much easier and cooler to make generational claims, though.
Maybe just use year of birth instead? That might be easier to classify people and their characteristics… Oh wait, the 42nd, 43rd, and 45th presidents were all born in 1946. Maybe not.
No, you missed the point. What are the boomers doing to solve any of these problems? Because the younger generation IS trying to solve these problems. The boomers appear to be standing in the way of solutions. Can anyone prove that wrong?
Have you read “Factfuless” by Hans Rosling? It does a very nice job of explaining why your intergenerational stereotypes are both wrong and a product of lazy thinking. And you will learn to rethink deeply held beliefs.
I agree that it’s not right to think that ALL Boomers are bums and blame all of our current problems on them.
I’m a boomer and I vote. I also volunteer to help my local community. I’d say I’m not unlike many of my peers.
Not sure what more I can do as a “regular” person who has no political ambitions. What’s the reasonable expectation to elevate us boomers out of “bum” status?
I saw an interview with Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of “Men without work.”
Another aspect of the declining work force is house husbands. When wife is a professional with a better paycheck, hubby staying home to take care of the kids is popular. Especially when day care for the kids costs more than hubby can earn.
He also mentioned the large ex-convict population of the US. Several million who cannot get a job.
Plus long Covid.
And the decline of good paying middle class jobs. Many decide to move in with parents and wait to inherit.
Sure. The Boomers were the ones who invented Earth Day, the largest environmental awareness celebration in world history. And presided over the creation of the EPA. And lots of related activities. And…
The US poverty rate was 22.5% in 1960. It fell to 13% in 2013, and is 11.5% today. Generally speaking, world poverty has followed the same trajectory.
There is more education available to more people than at any time in the nation’s history, including higher education. In 1960 there were 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world, virtually all of them in in the US. Today there are estimated to be around 12,000, so: progress. Not perfect, but then you seem to want to complain if everything isn’t perfect, which of course (news alert!) it’s never going to be.
And finally, lest you accuse me of ignoring guns: in 1960 more than half of all households had a gun, Today it’s about 45%. Curiously the attitudes toward gun control have gotten stronger, but owing to peculiar political circumstances the laws have gotten weaker. That’s a system fault, not the Boomers fault, not the Millenials fault.
Please. Get off your high horse and come down here where the real people live. Life is messy. Nothing is perfect. And we’re doing the best we can, and based on results - which really should be the only measure - we’re doing pretty well. All of us.
The problem for the boomers was we were raised in a time where are parents did better than their parents.
We faced crushing layoffs as we entered our twenties and thirties. We faced stagnant incomes for the majority of boomers. We faced en masse a horrible economy made worse by our support of punitive policies.
We had policies to outsource. We supported that.
We called people crack queens, how racist was that? And our group was right in there.
We saw schools shot up. We refused to act.
We are the older generation now. We vote. En masse we suck.
We are en masse refusing to switch from a capital policy that was punitive to an industrial policy that is ultra generous. We suck. We en masse refuse the education to know better.
We had heavily subsidized college educations if we went to a state school. We go around today talking about how young people are dumb and lazy en masse. Yet a higher percentage of them are getting collage educated. En masse we fault them for being in debt. And we wont lift a finger.
Regardless of what you believe or not you are a great guy. You are not en masse. This is not an attack on anyone here.
But this is our economics en masse. Call it lazy to tell you that the voting block that sways elections in the mid terms wont do anything for anyone not even themselves unless it is punitive…a lazy theory? Really? C’mon guy you are not new to any of this.
Did you know supply side economics was purposely punitive? What else would you call it? A pony in a pile of it? It is the pile of it. We were gullible. If you are rich you could have been much richer. Even the rich were limited by how we ran our economy for the last 40 years between 1981 and 2020. We ate the pile of it. Not listening to someone call it out is lazy.
Instead everyone is thinking reality is an attack on themselves. It has been with supply side econ.
Goof the EPA was founded in 1970 by Nixon. I was seven years old. What does that have to do with the boomers? I get feeling good is nice but it does not have to simply feel good. Lets talk about reality. The response was a crickets from another day.
Note the boomers in those days that could vote were known for not voting much. In fact the Zs today participate in greater numbers by comparison. The Z’s give a darn. The boomers threatened by going to Vietnam were less inclined to vote in their youth.
The 2022 poverty line for a family of four in America is $27,750. It’s risen by nearly $10,000 since the year 2000. During this same time period, the median price of a home in America increased by over $300,000. The Center for American Progress noted in the early 1960s the poverty line represented roughly 50 percent of the median income for a family of four and today it only represents about 28 percent.
I was 23. I was born in 1947, putting me on the leading edge of Boomers. I was part of the “aware” contingent, championing such political causes as environmentalism, women’s right, and yes, the environment.
That’s a great thing to say, wouldn’t it be great for you if it was true? The data contradicts you.
The only group showing a steady increase in voting participation is, well, you know, Boomers. (To understand the chart you have to envision a shaded sweep of Boomers as they age, from “young’ at the left of the chart to “old” at the right. Feel free to notice how Millenials and Gen X and Z remain fairly static, while the aging cohort seems to ascend over time.)
In today’s lexicon, that would be “woke”, a crime in some states. Retrograde in planetary motion is an optical illusion. In Shiny-land, it is a reality. Seems too many old phartz forgot what they were advocating 50 years ago.
Remember, we are discussing the merits of a generation, not the subsets within a generation. If you want to argue that a majority of the post-Civil War generation favored lynching Blacks or overthrowing local governments then you may have a point, but I don’t believe that was true. The Klan might have had majority support in the south, but I don’t think it extended to an entire generation.
Part of reading history correctly is to look at all sides of an issue. The generation that you correctly point out was associated with anti-Black violence also passed the 15th amendment. That generation lost hundreds of thousands in the Civil War and gave Black males the right to vote. That counts for something
In 2018, the Millennials finally surpassed the Boomers in number. When I consider the 25 years of Boomer ascendancy before 2018, three words come to mind: Greed, Irresponsibility, Self-serving.
Greed as demonstrated by the dot-com and real estate bubble that produce the Great Recession. Irresponsibility that produced the most obese generation with a major opioid addiction problem. Self-serving in that Boomers protected social security and medicare for themselves while doing little to guarantee the solvency of these institutions for later generations. Boomers also ran up enormous deficits to enhance their quality of life (the Bush and Trump tax cuts primarily benefitted Boomers), leaving the bill for future generations to pay.
Finally I will remind everyone that the Boomers elected Trump in 2016 and tried to elect him again in 2020.
This isn’t some crazy subset of the Boomer generation. These are the majority views of the Boomer Generation. They supported the tax cuts despite the deficit impact. They are against raising taxes to support social security or other social safety nets. They continue to grow obese. And they still support trump.
One moment you are talking 1970 voting, the next you are posting stats for 1980. By then your group was 33 and up. You are trying to prove me full of nonsense or lazy but that wont do it.
More to the point you are not the point. You are not representative of the boomers en masse. Neither am I. We agree on our points of view. The majority of our generation is trying to stymie us…and succeeding.
The crazy subset of boomers is Goof and I. But Goof wants to pretend like his lone vote for environmentalism has won the day. Meanwhile back at the ranch…
Not in 1970 when Nixon was in office. Nixon by comparison was to the left of Bernie Sanders. I kid you not.
Look this is about economics and economic memory. The boomers had a very rough time in the 80s. Then the majority of boomers who were not well educated often had a harder time compared to their upwardly mobile parents and grandparents…en masse…
The difference is supply side economics. Buy into such crap at our nation’s detriment.
I remember. Wage and price controls. Protectionist tariff on Japanese TVs to protect Zenith, RCA, Sylvania (part of GTE), Motorola. The big one: the Penn Central tried the “too big to fail” argument and demanded a government bailout. Nixon nationalized the road instead, three years after nationalizing rail passenger service.
Then there was “revenue sharing”. Giving money to state and local government to assist in providing services to the people in general. Surely, the work of a Communist (/sarcasm)
I remember when that Federal revenue sharing money hit Kalamazoo County. I never saw so many roads being repaved, at once, in my life. Of course, that is ancient history. Infrastructure today is left to rot, because ideology says the money needs to go to another tax cut for the “JCs” instead.
Building it was not sexy. The reason the public wanted it was to expand the economy now that is sexy. Instead our generation is saying lets save money. In fact we see everything as a waste of money en masse.
Again you could be to the right of Genghis Khan this is not about you. This is about the majority actions. Not even our opinions but what we do as a group. We got it all saved up for the nursing home.
There is the solution. Give the “JCs” their tax cuts–with ONE caveat. Each and every individual year there is not double-digit economic growth means the taxes on the ALL the “JCs” is doubled–and this doubling continues each and every year until we see “sustained” annual double-digit economic growth. At which point, taxes will be frozen for the “JCs”.
“One moment you are talking 1970 voting, the next you are posting stats for 1980. By then your group was 33 and up.”
Sorry to play nitpicker, but this statement is inaccurate. The boomer generation is typically defined as those born between 1946 and 1960, or in some cases between 1946 and 1964. Therefore, in 1980 the boomers were either 20 or 24 and older.
Nevertheless, I tend to agree with the general argument that the boomers used their dominant position as a voting bloc to enrich themselves at the expense of all others. It’s a very complicated analysis, but the evidence is pretty clear.
In the end, I think we’ll find that treating the government like a bank to borrow from will be the greatest lapse in responsibility. It accelerated the use of resources and did much to create the current income inequality. My pet peeve is boomers growing up in a well-subsidized system of education and welfare, and then benefiting as adults in a system with fewer subsidies and lower taxes. It’s ridiculous.
If they want to help JC’s create jobs, they ought to get tax cuts for creating jobs, shouldn’t they, not just for being in a position to create jobs? But, really, we need to move the tax burden up the ladder to the people with the incoming money, logically. That is what worked the best in the past, and it would work the best in the future.
