How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America

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My dad is on the older side of the boomers and he is a screaming liberal. I am a moderate, though most people are entirely distrustful or unbelieving of that designation.

We were talking about socialism earlier in the thread, I once called my Dad a socialist and he hesitated and said, “yeah, so what’s your point?” 😯 So trust me, there are many boomers that are not republicans.
 
What they did in the 60’s and the 70’s? I was a teenager in the 60’s and early 70’s.
I was not in charge of any decisions. I think you need to look at those born during the
depression - in the 1920’s and 1930’s and before.
 
The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.
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That and a lot more.

I think it all started in the 1950s or 60s. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Everyone, rich or poor, wanted a handout from the government. National debt (of the US) began its steady rise with no plan to pay it off. The duty of citizens to neighbor, country, and society took a backseat to self-interest. Education at every level began to fail. Courtship, marriage, and child rearing began to fail. In the US, both major political parties were corrupted, with the overwhelming support of voters. Substance abuse became socially acceptable. Have I left anything out? Probably.

I think he is on to something.
 
2towers said:
My dad is on the older side of the boomers and he is a screaming liberal. I am a moderate, though most people are entirely distrustful or unbelieving of that designation.

We were talking about socialism earlier in the thread, I once called my Dad a socialist and he hesitated and said, “yeah, so what’s your point?” 😯 So trust me, there are many boomers that are not republicans.
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Yeap.

Here a a few famous Baby Boomer Democrats: Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, etc

Really though, you just need to look at the US Senate:

35 out of 46 Senate Democrats are Baby Boomers, including Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Jack Reed, Tom Carper, Debbie Stabenow, Maria Cantwell, Bob Menendez, Al Franken, etc

There are only 30 out of 52 Republican Baby Boomers in the US Senate.

The other generations of the Senate consist of:

Silent Generation:
  • 6 Democrats – including the 2 Independents who caucus with the Democrats
  • 12 Republicans
Generation X:
  • 10 Republicans
  • 6 Democrats
I find this to be very interesting. When I have time, I might look at all of Congress.

God Bless
 
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7_Sorrows said:
What they did in the 60’s and the 70’s? I was a teenager in the 60’s and early 70’s.
I was not in charge of any decisions. I think you need to look at those born during the
depression - in the 1920’s and 1930’s and before.
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I’m referring to Woodstock, Vietnam protests, the sexual revolution, drugs, etc. By 1970, the oldest Baby Boomers were already 24 years old (33 years old by 1979)
 
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Every generation thinks the next few generations are ruining everything. Always.

Don’t panic.
 
I am currently reading Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World, by Archbishop Charles Chaput. A major theme in the beginning of Chaput’s book runs also in the article cited in the OP, that is, the decline of solidarity and the rise of individualism.
Bruce Gibney:
Starting with Reagan, we saw this national ethos which was basically the inverse of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” This gets flipped on its head…
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On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism. It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is.
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I think we can [recover], but it’s imperative that we start sooner than later… That will not be easy, and there’s no way around the fact that millennials will have to sacrifice in ways the boomers refused to sacrifice, but that’s where we are — and these are the choices we face.
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Makes perfect sense to me.

Real the whole interview. It’s spot on.
 
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Catholicwife32 said:
I find it very odd that this article portrays boomers as Republicans who weren’t concerned about the environment. That is SO NOT their reputation. The reality is that even that just because you’re a part of the same generation doesn’t mean that you share the same political views.
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Both major political parties are responsible. Equally responsible, I would say. The actual differences between the two parties are very slight. In the Boomer years, both parties have trimmed their positions so that they are very close to the middle. Both want to give away too much and ask too little. And the voters made them do it.
 
That was the part of the article that struck me the most.

Perhaps it is because I was raised in an Irish Catholic democrat family (JFK was very honored), I was taught that those who were given much owed much. That seems to have been a concept that most baby boomers lost about the same time they got rid of manners and other societal norms.

Note that I am smack dab in the middle of the baby boomer group (1956). Many people from more family oriented countries are surprised to find out that I paid for my children’s college instead of making them take out loans, that I helped support my sick brother, that I took care of my sick parents. Apparently this is not the reputation of boomers or Americans anymore.

Sad.
 
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Wow, Sally, you found something that VOX and I generally agree on.

You need a medal for that!
 
phil19034 said:
’m referring to Woodstock, Vietnam protests
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I remember hearing about Woodstock after I got back from Vietnam, and speaking of that war it wasn’t Boomers that started the thing.

You just can not paint an entire generation with a coat of “blame paint”.
 
Milt said:
You just can not paint an entire generation with a coat of “blame paint”.
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I mean, hopefully it’s understood that when people complain about boomers, they’re being a little tongue-in-cheek and don’t literally mean every single boomer.

Anyway, to trash boomers some more: 🙂

My favorite boomerism is the lecturing they do on hard work, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, and self reliance while completely failing to recognize all the help they got. I once heard a boomer lawyer complaining to his boomer buddy about how all the young lawyers he worked with complained constantly about their student loans, and how they couldn’t afford to work for a modest starting salary. He said something like, “I put myself through law school delivering pizzas part time. I didn’t need to borrow money from the government.”

What makes this completely ridiculous is that when that guy graduated from law school, annual tuition adjusted for inflation was something like $7000. It’s now around $55000 at a lot of schools. $40,000 would be cheap. But of course, he had no idea that the reality of educational costs had changed so much, and just assumed that all young people were just lazy, entitled whiners.
 
Millennials start from 1976 (you have achieved adulthood in the new millennium that is what the millennials are; what is adulthood? it’s a wide range). So many have had plenty of time of making many business decisions. Not many millennials in powerful political positions in USA yet.
In the rest of the world things are changing.
Emmanuel Macron in France, Justin Trudeau in Canada. I wonder which country will be run my a millennial next.
 
Our SSI and MediX programs were going broke well before baby boomers got their nose in the trough.

This all started with the greatest generation getting the benefits they wanted.
 
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