Vox discussion with an author on why most baby boomers have wrecked America. The final message is pretty much "if we don't have massive turnover in politics, we're screwed". Edit: Or possibly a massive lurch to the left, as we've been seeing more and more with millenials.
This is about as credible as any of the "millennials have ruined America!!1!" articles out there. People simply love to hate on other generations, it seems.
No, its not. Boomers fucked up both America and the world.
To provide just one of many examples: social security. Boomers are one of the only large groups of people on planet Earth that are categorically opposed to welfare. They are also unusually predisposed against raising taxes in all its forms.
Because of the boomer's political influence, the formation of a functioning healthcare system in the US has been delayed by decades. As has a tax structure that would function to promote movement of money and reduction of wealth inequality.
Yet, that same influence protects social security on absolute terms. Social security, which is a tax on the young that only benefits the old. Social security, which is blatantly a form of welfare to protect the old. Social security, which costs the nation
more than our bloated military. If the baby boomers held to their own principles, we would essentially not have a deficit. (this isn't an exaggeration, the current deficit is a little under a trillion IIRC, if we dropped social security but kept up the taxes that supported it, almost all of that trillion would be gone)
I have heard of many nations on Earth where political power is used to give wealth and agency from one group to another. Be it from a lower class to an upper class, one ethnic group to another, the citizens of other nations to the citizens of the home nation. But I have never heard of any other nation on Earth where on such a wide scale political power is used to plunder the younger generation for the sake of the old.
For anyone who didn't know, Boomers are called that because they were part of a baby boom. Their generation is larger than the generations that came both before and after, which is why political power is so skewed towards the elderly in the US (and why in 10-20 years there's going to be a massive political shift as those elderly die). Boomers were raised during a time of economic growth. Between their inflation-adjusted higher incomes, more effective social services, and greatly reduced inflation-adjusted prices, when Boomers first graduated high school and college they had a buying power something like 4-10 times as much as Millennials have now. They grew up in a time of political upheaval and activism powered by the fact that they had so much disposable income they could afford to go out and make change in the world. During the Clinton and Reagan administrations, the majority of Boomers formed a de facto united political bloc consisting of conservative democrats, swing state moderates, and economic conservatives. From formation to the election of Obama, this voting bloc got its way. Boomers, satisfied in their wealth and power, forgot their activism and their old frustrations. They began to grow dissatisfied because the perceived economic injustices of America weren't being fixed, but were blinded by the dissatisfaction to the fact that in almost every way, their informal center-right political platform was being implemented. When Obama was elected on social media and youth turnout, they finally saw something happen in American politics that wasn't driven by them. And that planted a deeper seed of anger and frustration than they already had. But the thing is that Obama was still 80% in line with what the majority of Boomers wanted, he just wasn't their candidate. In 2016, the seed of Obama era frustration blossomed, and angry Boomers voted in Trump. That decision has broken the center-right, Boomer dominated bloc that has run the country for 2-3 decades. Economic conservatives are no longer the driving force in the Republican party. The conservative democrats are diluting their political influence as some swing left to become economic or progressive democrats while others stay where they are. All that the boomers have is the swing voters now, but the swing voters of 2018 aren't going to live in Ohio, they're going to live in the political strongholds of the Republicans. The Boomers quietly grind their teeth, feeling futile as their political influence collapses, too blind to see no one did this to them.
See, Boomers are so used to getting their way that that's status quo to them. Getting everything they want is mediocrity, ruling everything is equality. A petty but representative example of this would be Christmas. US toy advertising is designed to manipulate kids into harassing their parents into spending large amounts of money. My impression is that a lot of older working class men in America see/saw Christmas as something stressful they do for the kids. They spend a lot of money, fall off ladders putting up Christmas lights, ect. ect. Its a sacrifice. But if you look at what Christmas actually is in America, its super focused on Boomers. Every song, every Christmas movie is from the 90s. And the narrative around Christmas, of uniting the family and decorating the house, that's what Boomers care about. It doesn't reflect millennial values at all. This isn't to say that Christmas has hurt Millennials exactly. Its more that, to paraphrase Randal Munroe, "every year since the 90s we've been recreating the Christmas of the Boomers' childhood".
This is where the great irony of the Boomer's anger comes in. The taxes have been cut. The "welfare queens" put out on the street. We have a strong military. We support our troops, we "support" our cops. Media that would "corrupt the youth" has been censored so widely that 90% of the population doesn't see it as censorship anymore. The free love movement was quashed, and the LGBT movement only allowed to move forward only once it adopted the old dream of the nuclear family and suburban home. The civil rights movement has been blocked, the war on drugs continued despite 95% of everyone who isn't an old white person hating it. And now that its collapsed, its being quietly dismantled behind the scene so that Boomers don't have to think about the enormity of the harm they caused. How many of them do you think would still say Bill Clinton was a good candidate? How many of them do you think would say they liked him because he was hard on crime?
In every way that matters, Boomers got their way. Yet they're still massively dissatisfied. For my entire life, everyone I've known over the age of 50 has taken it as a given that the country is on a downward slope. Maybe they don't hate the government, but they hate "how polarized things have become", or they have some pet peeve with government. Or they just take it as a given things are going badly. Because again, they're so used to getting their way, getting their way reads as not getting their way. This is where Obama comes in. Obama was a center-left candidate. He differed from Boomers in three main points: he was apathetic towards the war on drugs, he wanted a modern healthcare system (remember, by international standards Obamacare is a private system), and he believed in climate change (but was not primarily motivated by climate issues). On everything else, he was pretty much lockstep. And those are not big points. But the thing is, they didn't elect him. He was a youth candidate. And so they were
furious. See, what happened is, they neither got their way nor didn't get their way. Obama was a mixed victory for their voting bloc. But they had
never lost a presidential election before. To them, winning felt like a loss. So not winning? It felt like the sky was falling.
This isn't even getting into the harm climate change denial has done. Its a phenomenon unique to pretty much us and the UK; societies disconnected from the global communication network and modern science don't necessarily believe in climate change, but it would be disingenuous to call some pre-industrial village or hunter gatherer tribe "climate change deniers". We can't even say its China's fault any more, and AFAIK the climate change deniers in the UK have pretty much let off. Its JUST this one cluster of entitled fucks in the US dragging the entire world further past the point of no return. Anyone see Moana? Some Polynesian islands have already dissapeared beneath the sea. When that happens the tribe doesn't just reform somewhere else; their culture is inseparable from the island. The people might live but the society is broken. Its basically inevitable at this point that that's going to happen to that entire culture. It will effectively cease to exist. Its also highly unlikely Puerto Rico will ever recover or become a state, they might not be rebuilt in time for next hurricane season and its just going to get worse and worse every year. New Orleans is on the Boomer's shriveled, ignored conscience, now Texas joins it. And this is the minor stuff. The harm we're looking at in the next decade from global warming will make us wish we could have Katrina back.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4188661 times)