This is clearly not true. Government spending on education was lower during the boomer education years. For the boomers, education spending started just below 3% of GDP and slowly rose to just above 5% of GDP where it remained and slowly rose some more to somewhere between 5.5 and 6% of GDP today. And today there are proportionally quite a bit fewer kids than there were then.
Similarly, welfare spending is far higher today than in boomer years as well.
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I am providing graphs as I am able to find them. They are “close enough” to illustrate the point. Yes, you are picking nits. If you would like,m however, you may create your own graphs, which will show the same points, except slightly expanded in range.
Uh, no. The boomers built interstates, airports, and all manner of other infrastructure, we made education available to the widest group in the history of the world, and pressed for social change as has benefited minorities, women, gays and immigrants who have faced rampant discrimination for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
It is true that we have presided over the greatest era of wealth creation in the history of the world, and we have benefited from it, but you have to have a seriously cynical view to think that is a bad thing.
Yes, it sped up the use of resources, a trend that has only been going on since the first metal was smelted a jillion years ago. Yes, there is great income inequality, but still far less than 80 year ago, 100 years ago, 200, 400, or 1000 years ago. The trend is not good, I acknowledge, but the causes for it are complex - and largely political - which is influenced by many factors, “greed” being only one of them.
Finally, “borrowing from government” is a misnomer. There isn’t an advanced society on the planet that doesn’t use debt to pay for things, from infrastructure to social programs. Even Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries on the planet runs debts equivalent to 30% of their GDP. (We are well above that, obviously.)
Yes, we do have a spending problem. Even more so, we have an income problem, given that we have among the lowest levels of taxation in the world and the most expensive military on the planet. It can be fixed. The Boomers won’t leave things perfectly, but then no generation ever has.
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Hi MarkR,
I’m going to push back a little on this very complicated subject.
From the consumer’s standpoint, I think I make a good case. Anecdotally, I know my college sweetheart was able to work her way through college, spending about 15-20 hours per week working in the dormitory cafeteria.
I’m guessing it cost something like $4-7k to fund a year of college at our state school back in the late 1970s.
The primary case to make that college is no longer affordable is the amount of student debt, estimated at $1.745T here:
Student loan debt is about $32k per student, up from $3,900 in 1980. But that’s not as big a number as it sounds. That works out to a 5.2% increase per year, during a time when the GDP increased an average 5.4% per year. (calculated by taking the 41st root of N1/N2, then subtracting 1 from that number and multiplying by 100)
But it certainly does not seem like college is as affordable as it once was.
Here is a 2014 perspective by NPR:
Hi Goofy,
I’m not completely cynical about it. I think I could find data that shows that people between 65 and 85 years old have a higher percentage of the total wealth than they enjoyed in other eras.
I’d probably agree that we presided over the greatest era of wealth creation, but I’d also argue that the key discoveries that lead to that boom period (semiconductor logic, lasers) were figured out by a previous generation.
Total government debt increased from about $1T in 1980 to about $30T at the end of 2022. Using the same technique as before, that yields an increase of about 8.4% per year, well above the GDP growth of about 5.4%. This next comment is debatable, but I think this may indicate that taking on debt is becoming less productive as time goes on, that we are entering a debt spiral. $90k per person in the US. I say the only way out is a debt jubilee sometime in the future.
Anyway, thanks.
I’ll give a single data point. I went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, graduated in 1989. About 6-7 years ago I got some alumni rah-rah talking about how Rose has some of the top ROI of colleges out there. Roughly what I found out was that current grads were spending about 4X what I did, with starting salaries a little more than 2X what my average starting salary was. The other depressing thing was how few colleges seemed to have a positive ROI.
Now, I’m also one to see immense value in college outside the salary perspective. The personal growth, the friendships, the life lessons, being on your own for the first time, the exposure to subject matters outside your immediate career goals. None of that you get from Coursera! None of that you get from You Tube, or doing it on your own! ALL THAT HAS VALUE, even if it does not reflect in earned income. But still, I think you see where I’m coming from, that college has become a larger financial burden on students than it was on me.
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Your chart shows that 90+% of that increase in education spending occurred prior to 1980. That’s not the Boomers.
The relevant question is where do the majority of Boomers stand on the issues you care about. This one table pretty much answers that.
Boomers supported Trump in 2016 and after four years of experiencing Trump first hand they voted for him again in 2020. M-G- is the party of the Boomers. Over 50% of M-G- is over 65, those are the Boomers.
https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/demographics-group-affinities/
If the Boomers disappeared tomorrow there would be no more political gridlock, no more “stop the steal”. The Millennials and GenZ trend strongly to the democrats. The Boomers are the problem.
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Total education spending was 6.4% of GDP in 2020, but it was not all government spending, because Shiny ideology demands everything be rationed by ability to pay:
The expenditure on education as a % of GDP in the US was 6.4% in 2020, an increase of 3.8% from the previous year. Between 2010-2020, the expenditure on education as a % of GDP in the United States decreased by 16.7%. In 2020, the US spent more than $1.3 trillion on education, with private education expenditure of $354 billion and public education expenditure of $984 billion.
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College appears to cost more, at least in Michigan, because the (L&Ses) have sharply cut state funding, and shifted the cost onto the students.
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Absolutely true. Having more than one party slows things down a lot. If we had a single party, at least for a few decades, everything could get done, especially the very progressive things. Single party rule is the answer to all our problems.
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Comparing generations is hard, due to a lot of factors
Certainly generations before the boomers tended to have lots more pensions and boomers tend to need to rely on IRAs and 401k’s that are counted as wealth.
And then there is the fact that many more boomers have two paychecks, not something that was as common in our parent’s generations.
IMO it is a stretch to complain about wealth accumulated by a senior group, when, in fact, that is what has been preached as the responsible thing to do – save for retirement so that you don’t have to rely on SS.
Mike
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You can say that about any voting block. If only those people were gone just imagine what the rest of us could do. Why pick just on the old and vanishing?
Ya know the We will not be replaced Party types had a very healthy Youth demographic from the crowds I saw. (And some people I know here in Corn Land.) Same with the Evangelicals. Religion ain’t goin’ anywhere. Same with the Deus ex Free Market people. In fact, numerically the Boomers can be easily erased now. I don’t see what the problem is. But… ah…they ain’t the only problem. But it’s easy to reduce solutions to all problems to finger pointing.
You will all get your chance in turn and your grandchildren will call you ignorant at best, evil at worst, and you will wonder why. Like it always goes. Unless future generations actually get smarter…? I’m joking.
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Although I would argue that 2 parties is less than optimal also. 3 might do it or even 4. Beyond that you get into a mess of coalitions of parties that don’t even agree (see Israel…)
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NTT C
Goofy was hatched in 1947 I think he said further up. He voted at age 23 in 1970. I was 7 years old in 1970 born in 1963. Goofy was 33 in 1980. The goofers was discussing 1970 with 1980 datum…cross post allusion…yes it is all wrong but it was Sir Goof that got it wrong. I was pointing out I was not the lazy one.
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How did you get the 5.4% growth rate for the 1981 to 2020 period? The best year 1984 was the only year with growth over 5%. The period was very slow growth. Are you reverse engineering a CAGR?
This is the only chart that matters. Because it demonstrates an industrial policy and then a capital formation policy, demand side econ followed by supply side econ. No matter how many little uneducated lies Milton Friedman told.
This is public debt as a percentage of GDP…
an overblown idiot. The problem was with new deal structures. The solution was only needed from 1981 to 1990. After that we see the trashing of our nation to line a few pockets. No matter what his Ivry tower philosophy he decided to ignore his own stupidity in favor of greed. The rich have not benefited by any of this since 1990. The rich would have been richer.
google result
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy.
Again that is only because the boomers’ parents were growing the GDP like wildfire. The frugal boomers themselves have not been growing the economy properly. That skews the results tremendously.
Your parents did that. The outline for the infrastructure all comes from the 1950s and early 60s. You were not voting. Yes you believe in those things but most of our generation does not. It costs money, the guys do not want to be taxed.
I have to add…all the guys I know that do not want to be taxed do have more than enough money to enjoy their retirements. Only a couple of them would have ever have been effected by higher top bracket income taxes. Most of them are clueless they are paying more in other taxes, ie property, sales taxes etc because they gave the richest men in the room a few tax cuts. Cuts those couple of guys have never needed.
The Greediest Generation had help growing that GDP. They voted themselves all the money they thought they’d need to have a good life, then as they aged they pulled up the ladder having gotten theirs. The first wave boomers got a good deal on that too and followed suit. The rest, not so much.
Side note: The main reason the Greedies and the first Wave Boomies were able to catch the wave was because the USA was the only general store, bank, and factotum in town for 30 years. Ya know until WWII finally ended.
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FCorelli,
I have moved off those points about the boomers who were successful.
Most white males over age 50 as of 2019 can not afford to retire. Only 10% have “enough money” to retire. 40% have savings. 50% are living paycheck to paycheck. They have my sympathy.
Other demographics have far more of my sympathy.
The problem I have with them is how gullible the majority of them have been. The rich included have short changed themselves.
Again look at the table just above with public debt as a percentage of of GDP.
It was not greedy to line ones pockets with lower taxes. It was shortsighted. It was all sorts of things but getting more money out of it it wasn’t. Everyone ended up with less and $31 tr in debt.
Hi Leap,
Here’s how I calculated it.
I looked at the St. Louis Fed Data for GDP here:
The Q4 1980 GDP number is 2982 million, or 2.98T
The Q4 2022 GDP number is 26132 million,. or 26.132T
26.132/2.982 = 8.7544 times larger.
If we assume 1980 GDP equals 1, and 2022 GDP equals 8.7544, we can calculate the yearly growth over 42 years. We are solving for X, where X to the 42nd power equals 8.7544.
This is where Google is so awesome. It is a miracle how fast Google solves these problems.
So I type into Google "what is the 42nd root of (26132/2982), and Google responds in a blink of an eye: 1.053
So that’s a 5.3% increase every year from 1980 to 2022. The math is (1.053 - 1) * 100 = 0.053 * 100 = 5.3%
I really need to read one of Milton Friedman’s primary texts to form a worthy opinion. Mostly economists fail to impress me because their arguments seem to be largely if not entirely qualitative. I think the one to read is Capitalism and Freedom, but I could be wrong.
Milton Friedman gave politicians justification for pushing lower taxes and severely limited government, probably more than he would have considered judicious. Currently, both government and the private sector have more than their fair share of inefficiencies. Too many oligopolies, and too many empire builders.
One more general comment. Probably more than anything, the great wealth creation was a result of the one-time effect of globalization, and the USA benefited mightily, because we had most of the world’s best corporations. My opinion is that we could exhibited better long-range planning. The market-based system suffers from short-sightedness. Controlling people is like herding cats!
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Ntt C,
That chart is not the “real” growth rate. That is not adjusted for inflation. The prior chart up higher that I posted was adjusted for inflation, the real rate of GDP growth.
OK, fine.
But this number is still useful to compare the growth in the economy versus the growth in, say, college expenses, which was surprisingly about the same.