I think this is an insane article. Really, one can't indict a whole
generation for the negatives that are manifesting themselves in our society
today. For one thing, these negatives are appearing in several European
countries. What caused them? Could it have been our economic system which
created commercial television and a belief that material prosperity, that
owning things, that ease and convenience, are the goals that people should
strive for? And then there was the American belief in American
exceptionalism. We are the best, the most democratic, the wealthiest country
in the world. We have the best medical care, the best military. Who would
want to live anywhere else? All of this is part of our culture, passed down
from generation to generation and encouraged by a government/corporate
partnership. This article blaming the Boomers is like blaming poor people
for being poor.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2017 2:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Is This Really My Generation?
Hi all,
The sad answer to my question in the subject line is a shameful yes. IMHO,
this article accurately describes how baby boomers, Democrats and
Republicans alike, have driven America into the ground. When I first began
reading this thing, I was hoping that I could come up with good arguments
against this author's well-reasoned points but I cannot. I look forward to
his book which I intend to read. (see end of article.
Bob Hachey
How the baby boomers destroyed everything
By Bruce Cannon GibneyFebruary 26, 2017
Even before the election, Americans were asking just how we got here - to
this sullen moment of national reckoning. Since November, the autopsy has
dragged
on so long it seems there could be nothing left to dissect. But the search
continues, because no truly satisfying answer has yet been offered.
Deplorables,
deportables, economic malaise, rural resentment, coastal hauteur whatever -
these are just symptoms. The root illness remains undiagnosed, but here it
is: the baby boomers, that vast generation of Americans born in the first
two decades after World War II. The body politic rests on the slab because
boomers
put it there, because decades of boomerism produced the problems and
disaffection of which 2016 was merely the latest expression.
It's a shocking hypothesis, but then again, America has suffered a shocking
decline. In 1971, Alan Shepard was playing golf on the moon. Today, America
can't put a man into orbit (or, allegedly,
the Oval Office)
without Russian assistance. Something changed, and that something was the
boomers and the sociopathic agenda they emplaced.
My indictment of boomers may seem overbroad, but the thesis is quite
specific: the unusual prevalence of sociopathy in an unusually large
generation. How
does that disorder manifest? Improvidence is reflected in low levels of
savings
and high levels of
bankruptcy.
Deceit shows up as a distaste for facts, a subject on display in everything
from Enron's quarterly reports to daily press briefings. Interpersonal
failures
and unbridled hostility appeared in unusually high levels of divorce and
crime from the 1970s to early 1990s. These problems expressed themselves at
generationally
unique levels in boomers, to a greater extent than in boomers' parents or
children at comparable ages. (My forthcoming book lays out all these data in
detail.)
Boomers weren't genetically predestined to be dysfunctional; they were
conditioned to be. They were the first generation to be raised permissively,
the
first reared on television and subject to its developmental harms, and the
only living group raised in an era of seemingly effortless prosperity. Can
too
much license, TV, and unearned wealth distort personalities? May I suggest
looking south toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
The boomers' sociopathic inclinations might be of sociological, but not
political, interest except for one fact: Boomers have a lot of voting power.
Although
boomers
peaked at just over half the voting age population in the early 1980s,
their influence kept growing as they voted more frequently, unleashed a
flood of political money, and elected co-generationalists, all in reckless
pursuit
of the sociopathic agenda. In the 1970s, the older establishment had already
begun bending to boomer power, though not always cravenly enough, a problem
boomers resolved by becoming the establishment itself. Boomers' notable
early achievement was electing Bill Clinton, who began the long saga that
meandered
through Bush II and ends - well, who knows how exactly it will end?
What happened in the White House happened everywhere else. By 1994, boomers
held a majority of House seats, a proportion that peaked at 79 percent in
2008
and remains a still formidable 69 percent. The rest of government went the
same way: Boomers make up 86 percent of governors, about three-quarters of
the
proposed Cabinet, and much of the judiciary and bureaucracy. Except for
youthful Silicon Valley, the private sector also fell into boomer hands
decades
ago and remains there.
In Pa., boomers see the American Dream slipping away
Many from Butler High School's class of 1976 are now weary, worn, or
furious. For some, those feelings are driving their votes.
Baby boomers and their parents' friends
By the late 1990s, as boomerism really expressed itself, disasters arrived:
financial scandals, economic infirmities, mounting debt, unaddressed climate
change, a growing entitlements crisis, and more. Since it was politically
untenable to locate blame in obvious places, other explanations were
manufactured
for the nation's woes. (Immigrants!) Especially on the coasts, other
explanations have been long suspected, such as the predations of a swollen
GOP. Not
implausible, but then you have to ask where the swelling comes from, and
that circles back to boomers who, despite their hippie reputation, are net
Republican.
Anyway, the boomers' retrograde preferences mattered more than nominal
political affiliation, pushing even modern Democrats to the
right of Richard Nixon
on many matters. After all, it wasn't Nixon, or even Ronald Reagan, who
planted so many of the noxious seeds that blossom now; it was Clinton, the
ur-boomer
progressive. The "end of welfare as we know it"?
Clinton.
Berserk policies on crime, immigration, gays, deregulation, and surveillance
that bloated into today's prison state, travel bans, transgender showdowns,
and financial crises? Clinton again. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act,
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,
Defense of Marriage Act,
repeal of
Glass-Steagall,
etc.? Clinton provided the themes; Bush II and Donald Trump, the variations;
and other boomers, the orchestra and applause.
Barack Obama has been conspicuously absent, because my argument is as much
cultural as chronological. While birth makes Obama a late boomer, his
upbringing
left him distant - geographically and socially - from the boomer mainstream.
Not coincidentally, No Drama Obama was the most sober thing about American
politics in 25 years. But he was limited to moderating inherited
catastrophes - and prevented from pursuing policies that might benefit
people of lesser
means, whiteness, and age than the boomers he faced in Congress.
Surely, by 2016, it was time for a thorough reconsideration of the dogmas
that caused so much harm, but the last election hardly featured real policy
discussion.
So what if Social Security faces partial insolvency after
2034,
or that climate change has scientists and generals fretting for the world
circa 2040? By then, the median boomer will be dead. The only germane issue
for
the aging, unempathetic sociopath was blocking reform of senior
entitlements. Youths like Paul Ryan, with his irksome calculations and
future focus, couldn't
be trusted on this issue. But boomers Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,
whatever their other infirmities, pledged
loyalty
on this crucial item.
I don't imply that Clinton and Trump were otherwise equivalent. They
weren't. Nor do I assert that all of their co-generationalists are
sociopaths. They
aren't. But I don't shrink from arguing that an unusually large fraction of
boomers behaves sociopathically, with the power to realize their agenda. The
Koch brothers can't carry all the blame: The 1 percent is, by definition,
just 1 percent, unable to dictate national policy on its own. A giant
generation
of boomers can and does, and their overriding imperative is to consume at
someone else's expense. To say they succeeded is to understate.
The simplicity of the boomer agenda amplified the considerable power of
boomer votes, while clarifying otherwise complex issues, especially of
benefits
and taxes. Benefits, at least for the boomer middle class, were to be
expanded - period. Taxes, for the same group, would be cut or reallocated.
This dynamic
illuminates otherwise inexplicable deviations from orthodoxy practiced by a
machine supposedly seized by ideological gridlock. It explains why Reagan
lowered
taxes on income while raising them on capital gains (when boomers had
salaries but not portfolios), why Bill Clinton lowered taxes on houses and
stocks
(when boomers owned those in quantity), and why Bush II cut taxes with
unseemly attention lavished on the "death tax" (just as the boomers' parents
neared
expiration) while embracing
the largest expansion in welfare since the 1960s
(Medicare Part D, in time to benefit aging boomers). The machine works, at
least from the boomer perspective.
All these giveaways had consequences. The rich got richer, as we know, but
the rich are old. That is, they're boomers. The patterns of general boomer
gains
mirrored those of the very wealthy. From 1989 to 2013, wealth gaps between
older and younger households grew in the same way as those between the top 5
percent and the bottom 95 percent. Today's seniors (boomers) are much
wealthier relative to the present young than the seniors of the 1980s were
to then-young
boomers. All those tax breaks, bailouts, easy money, deregulation, and the
bubbles they spawned supported that boomer wealth accumulation while
shifting
the true costs to the future, to the young.
Still, no amount of tax reallocation could keep the government together and
goodies flowing, so boomers tolerated astounding debt expansion while
chopping
other parts of the budget. Gross national debt,
35 percent of GDP
when the boomers came of age, is now
105 percent,
a peacetime record expanding 3 percent annually, forever. But this
understates the problem, because not only does the family farm have a giant
mortgage,
it also desperately needs repair and modernization.
Unfortunately, boomers show no appetite for maintaining the assets their
parents accumulated. Public higher education, nearly free for boomers, has
become
dauntingly expensive. Infrastructure is neither built nor maintained, and
not even "responsible" boomers take this seriously. It was then-candidates
John
McCain and Hillary Clinton, those paragons of boomer probity, who proposed a
gas-tax holiday
in 2008, the
year the Highway Trust Fund went bust.
Federal
research and development funding
also suffered, with dispiriting consequences for the future. Smartphones may
be fairly recent, but their core technologies were developed with government
money long ago. Enjoy your iPhone now, because your iCopter and iKidney will
be indefinitely delayed.
The consequences of boomer overconsumption, underinvestment, and appetite
for risk reveal themselves every time a bridge or bank collapses, but can be
summarized in America's prolonged economic mediocrity. Finding decent growth
requires stretching all the way back to the 1990s, and even so, the 1990s
barely edged out 1970s' squalor on a per capita GDP basis. Thanks to boomer
policies, the new normal is 1.6 percent real growth, well below the 2.5 to
3.5 percent rates prevailing from the 1950s to the 1980s. For the young, the
price will be incomes 30 percent to 50 percent lower than they could have
been.
When problems grow large, boomers resort to deceit, and the huge degradation
of truth suggests just how bad things have gotten. Whether it be
misrepresentations
by Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, or General
Michael Flynn, boomer culture has wallowed in duplicity for decades.
Untruths are
emitted, others bear the consequences, and this has been the case for
decades. The dubious draft deferments of the 1960s became the
off-balance-sheet obligations
of the 1990s, ginned-up weapons of mass destruction of the 2000s, and
today's phantom terrorism in Bowling Green and Sweden. "Alternative facts"
are just
the most recent consequences of the boomers' declaration of epistemic
bankruptcy.
If Trump has given America one gift, it's a free hand to condemn the
generation of which he is the impeachable id. Henceforth, let us expect no
more from
people who achieved so little, who have such small interest in the future.
Let us dispense with ideas that aging flower children have substantial
claims
on goodness, as boomers liberal and conservative alike engaged in
warrantless wiretapping, extrajudicial assassinations, gratuitous assaults
on the dignity
of minorities, mass disenfranchisement, the erection of a vast and useless
penal state, and policies of cavalier disregard. Let us turn boomers out
from
offices high, corner, and otherwise, and keenly assess boomers'
contributions to society against their demands for interminable subsidy,
finding some reasonable
settlement. And let us do it soon.
Bruce Cannon Gibney is a venture capitalist and writer and the author of the
forthcoming book "
A Generation of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Betrayed America
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/02/26/how-baby-boomers-destroyed-every
thing/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html?p1=Article_Recommended_ReadMore_Pos5
