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It's intellectually dishonest to suggest we older people broke the system. And the story is true. A large number of parents with adult children have to make sacrifices to their own retirement plans to take care of their kids. This is a systemic problem, not something to blame on Gen Xers and Boomers.
It's a systemic problem they helped setup. The amount of public support they had while going through education and young adult life was wild. Unions were popular, housing was relatively cheap and affordable, same with education. Things didn't start blowing up til the 80s, 90s, 00s, when they were firmly of voting age and able to exert their numbers politically.
When did corporate and private tax policy change drasrically? The 80s. When did college costs start to increase? 1980 referencing a graph here.. When did housing start to increase (the first time)? In the 2000s, cause banks and the fed (led by boomers; all 5 of the largest financial institution crashes were headed by boomers; Lehman, Merrill, Citi, AIG, and Goldman Sachs), the fed was led By Greenspan prior to '06, but Bernanke afterwards (and he was the one who bailed those fuckers out, same with the GM and Chrysler with Bush, Boomer). Additionally, boomers are the generation most opposed to any climate change policy (along with Gen X, but that's a different conversation), referencing this article.
I do think it's a systemic issue. I just think boomers have played a large role in it's construction. Their parents before them had strong public works projects for infrastructure strong social safety nets, strong employee protections through growing unionization, lengthy fights for workers rights and de-segregation in many places. Boomers have wanted less of that and have actively worked to get rid of them.
The system wasn't built by no one, and changed pretty dramatically during a specific time frame.
While I definitely agree with you here, the systemic problem is in place due to an extreme overabundance of boomers sitting in Washington creating systematic problems and perpetuating existing ones. So, yes, not all boomers are culpable and blaming the whole generation is excessive, but perhaps this helps shed some light where the sentiment comes from.
Also, for most anyone after the boomer generation, retirement will be a complete financial impossibility so boomers inconveniencing their retirement for the sake of those who will never get to doesn't feel too out of line
extreme overabundance of boomers sitting in Washington
They're silent generation, even. They're born in the 30s and 40s, still running shit into their 90s.
Also, for most anyone after the boomer generation, retirement will be a complete financial impossibility
Well, that's not sustainable. It's not like people can keep working past their 60s.
Boomers are more to vote for conservative and liberals, more to vote, and a bigger part of the population. That's the truth of stats a'd demography. It's not all boomers, but as a generation, they failed their grand-children. And it comes to bite them now, which is the biggest surprise to me. I really thought they wouldn't see the collapse of the system or the global warming effects.