Poor boomers
Ah, have sympathy for us poor (in the literal sense of the word) boomers, even though many of you hate our aging guts:
…[C]urrent and prospective retirees have been hit on many fronts at once: They have less money, they earn less on what they have, their houses aren’t rising in value and the prospect of working longer to make up the shortfall has dimmed significantly in a lousy job market.
And watch out; we may drag you all down with us:
Low yields present retirees with a difficult choice: Accept the lower income offered by safer bonds, or take the risk of staying in the stock market. Either way, their predicament could put a long-term damper on the consumer spending that typically drives U.S. growth.
I’m a late boomer (pun intended).
We deserve everything we get. We’ve been the luckiest and most privileged generation in the history of the universe. We gave the world Obama, Pelosi, and Reid as thanks for it. We’ve done some good, and wasted more. There’s always hell to pay. We never counted on that.
I’m with MikeMc… we spent our lives making money by not producing anything real. Now it’s time to pay the piper and unfortunately our children will also have to pay. Geez.. just from a science/engineering perspective we are just now retiring the Space Shuttle that our parents designed!! Talk about mooching off your “inheritance”. What a pathetic bunch of losers.
What amazes me still is how many of the Boomers still think it’s 1969. Maybe that’s because all the ones I work with are in academia where the worst of the worst came to rest. At least I know there are others like me (such as Neo) out there somewhere.
Mike:
I am not so sure about that, it seems to me that the 18 year old to 29 years old gave us Obama. I refuse to assume any responsibility for his election.
BTW, Pelosi and Obama are not boomers.
It will be an interesting financial decade, this next one. Having bailed out of equities in Aug. 07, not because I was smart but because things were making me so nervous that I had to check in daily, I decided in early ’08 the old rules were dead. Longterm investing is dead until there is a reasonable hope of extrapolating into the near future. Those who have to live on investment income are in especially tough shape.
The young, consumers all and great ones, will slowly and painfully learn that. The termites have eaten the house. The past decades were fat, and a long lean time is unavoidable. Kind of like steering a supertanker: the helmsman turns the “wheel” all the way to port, but the vessel keeps on its starboard tack for miles more, before very slowly changing course over yet many more miles.
If the American economy is to recover, it will have to be via industrial production, by actually making something, and making it here. Consumerism as the backbone is rightfully dead, or at least dying. We cannot make it by being in service to one another.
1. But…but…but…we boomers are the most intelligent, best educated, best prepared generation this country ever produced.
Who said so? Why we did, during the Great Boomer Tantrum of the 1960s. Remember what a mess those bums over 30 (now known as the Great Generation) left us?
2. When I made a somewhat confused decision to join up during the Vietnam era, I never imagined what a role it would play in my future self-respect. It damaged my ability to participate in yuppie groupthink, but the tradeoff is worth it.
3. I worry that boomers may do as much damage leaving the scene as we did entering it.
4. The most common birthday range for boomers is 1946-1964. Obama’s 1961 makes the cut. His relationships with Ayers and Wright seal the deal afaic.
Maybe a better definition of “boomer” is those of us that remember when “political correctness” was considered “stupidity”, and “common sense” was common.
Sooner or later we are all forced to dine at a table laden with the consequences of our actions…. 🙂
I’m with the other guys… the boomers voted for the fools who got us here (like by stealing all the social security money and replacing it with IOUs).
We told them what was happening but they didn’t believe it… oh well. I won’t have my kids suffer to pay more money to help them dig out of their hole.
Even now, the tools over as Daily Kos, and such, are mostly boomers… Too ideological, partisan, and trying to relive the ‘60s’ to keep a serious eye on their own side’s problems…
Time to man up and take responsibility (for the first time in their lives).
Hey, enough with the boomer-bashing already. They are certainly a big part of the problem, but there’s plenty of blame to go around for other generations that came later, too, many of whom lived on credit they could not afford and whose whiz kid quants figured out clever mathematical ways to “prove” that none of the bills would ever come due.
As for what happened with Social Security, that started during the LBJ administration. Hardly the boomers’ fault.
A possibly related theme:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/2010_politics_and_the_cult_of.html
Note that some of the commenters on the article think that the “Greatest Generation” is worse than the boomers because it created the boomers – a theme I have seen repeated elsewhere.
Along those same lines, has anyone noticed a trend of older folk who suddenly decide that they never did anything for “ME” and go crazy selfish like an 18 year old? I have…
Elsewhere on Drudge report…
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10835851/1/hindenburg-omen-is-a-stock-market-crash-imminent.html
Somewhat tongue in cheek here obviously. I like the poll on the second page:
“Which of the following psychic scenarios do you most believe in?
The Hindenberg Omen
The World Cup Octopus
The 2012 Apocalypse”
Apparently most people believe in the octopus.
I’m pretty sure Social Security started under FDR…not LBJ.
I consider myself to be in the “Lucky Generation”…was born just before the boomers.
WWII took my generation out of the Great Depression…we were too young to really feel pain during either. Too young to serve in WWII or Korea and too old to serve in Viet Nam.
We have always had the boomers coming behind us…pushing up demand for our products and doing the low level work that needed to be done…either white or blue collar. When they were entry level, we were middle or higher management. They pushed up house, real estate, and stock prices too.
Because I was born late in the Depression, not many of us were born in that period, so competition amongst us was low.
Our generation was in high school and college during the 50’s a quiet, peaceful time (some say a boring time) when the USA was growing leaps and bounds. Nowadays, the boomers’ “senior citizen” votes will help protect us during our retirement.
For those doing the math, I am 72 years old…born in 1937.
Thank ya, boomers!
neocon:
Thanks for standing up for the boomers. We may not be perfect, but we inherited this world just like the rest of these folks…and from what I have seen from the next generation they are not exactly all brilliant, wise and self sacrificing themselves…and the previous generation may have been the greatest generation but they were also the people who really started a lot of this stuff. After all, Chomsky is not some baby boomer and neither was Mao or Che.
texexec: Of course Social Security started under FDR. That’s not what I was referring to. I was responding to Thomass’s comment (I suppose I should have addressed him by name) that, “the boomers voted for the fools who got us here (like by stealing all the social security money and replacing it with IOUs).”
I was referring to the point in 1968 where LBJ put Social Security into the unified general budget, which began the process to which Thomass refers. LBJ was elected in 1964, when not a single boomer was allowed to vote (the voting age was 21 at the time).
anna: I can’t say the present generation of young adults—who voted overwhelmingly for Obama—have exactly covered themselves with glory so far, either.
As a boomer, born 1948, I feel quite free to say that the boomer generation has been the biggest failure in American history. Following the Greatest Generation, we produced a population of whining, over-privileged effete snobs who wasted the sixties on drugs, wasted the eighties on greed, produced Billy Bob Clinton and Hussein Obama and are now going to bandrupt the country in our old age. If I was a member of one of the generations after the boomers, I would be looking forward to the joy of seeing the last aging hippie bite the dust. Not all was a waste. There were boomer heroes in Vietnam. Other than that, the boomers were a complete waste of time, space and air who took, took, took and produced nothing – unless you think tie-dye is a cultural milestone.
I have no sympathy at all. While every generation contains good and bad individuals (yadda, yadda, yadda), the Baby Boom generation was a vile, parasitic generation that has destroyed the future lives and hopes of millions of their successors.
I have one solution: the pensions (including Social Security accounts) of every person over 60 should be forcibly confiscated and used to pay off the national debt (as far as they will go). If that means a lot of Baby Boomers die early as homeless people on the street, then good riddance to ’em.
For those who are not WASP males, this country is a better place to live in than it was 40-50 years ago, and that is so after material progress and advances in technology are taken into account. The Great Boomer Tantrum of the 1960s had something to do with the improvement.
Rhetorical questions: But did the manner in which the improvement was accomplished contain the seeds of its undoing, or was the change sustainable? IMO the technological potential exists to make life correspondingly better in 40-50 years, but have the will and wisdom been lost?
With the passage of the decades I have come to acknowledge that the radicals of the 1960s posed valid questions and criticisms about things as they were, but I remain unconvinced about the quality of their answers and solutions.
To Not quite a boomer:
I’m a boomer. And like many here, I’m not especially proud of my generation’s legacy. I argue though that it’s not quite as black and white as some have painted the picture. As far as your solutions go, and here they are again:
“the pensions (including Social Security accounts) of every person over 60 should be forcibly confiscated and used to pay off the national debt (as far as they will go). If that means a lot of Baby Boomers die early as homeless people on the street, then good riddance to ‘em.’
wouldn’t it only be fair that your generation whom, Neo has pointed out, voted overwhelmingly for Obama, pay at least 2/3s of your salaries local, state, and federal taxes to pay for that sin until the budgets are right again? But, that still leaves a couple of other big problems — what are you going to do about your generation’s overall lack of ability to think critically and clearly? And how might you solve your generation’s (most of them in it anyway) obvious yuppie ‘me first’ and ‘out for me only’ attitudes that are so deeply seated in your behavior?
gs Says:
August 16th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
I’ve come to the opposite conclusion. I used to have more respect for the 60s radicals than I do now. Today I notice their nihilism and destructiveness more than I used to.
Geebus.
So, I guess everyone born between 1946 and 1964 is an “aging hippie” now. Well f#!k off and die all of you who want to lump every single person born in those times together as a whole. We aren’t *all* aging hippies. Indeed, if you want to blame any generation for the hippie movement, blame the so called “greatest generation”. They were the ones in power during those days and could have at least put up a show of maintaining control. But no, that was too much trouble, so they let their kids run wild. And that’s what we got.
And by the way, just because Tom Brokaw calls them that, doesn’t make it so. I mean, greatest as opposed to who? The Civil War generation? The Revolutionary generation of 1776? Or the pioneers who first conquered and then cleared the woodlands east of the Mississippi in the early 19th century – or the ones who crossed the continent and tamed the west in the back half of that same century. Or how about the “other half” of the boomers who did their duty and went off to fight a very unpopular war in Vietnam – rather than a very popular WWII – and left 54000 of their comrades dead on the field. And came home to – what, exactly? And I would point out that the leaders in that war were not boomers. Nope, just more of that “greatest generation” we are all so enamored of.
So, to Mike Mc and Physicguy, where do you get this “we” shite. (You got mice in your pockets?) I for one *opposed* the stupid hippie movement. Fat lot of good that did me, because my betters – the “greatest generation”, you know, the ones who were actually in charge – was busy giving them everything they demanded.
Do the math people. A person born in 1946 – the very first year of the boom – were only 19 years old in 1965. They were just starting out in college, or recruits in the army, or just stepping onto the very bottom rung of the working world ladder – and the sixties were already half over!
Oh yeah, lets talk a little about the “summer of love” – 1969 – where hundreds of thousands of “boomers” showed up to frolic in the mud and listen to rock and roll at Woodstock. Yep – boomers all. But who were the organizers? Who were the ones who put that whole shebang together and let it get so out of hand? Well, here’s a hint – they weren’t twenty somethings.
And who were the *leaders* during that time? Well lets see – 1960, Dwight Eisenhower, 1961-63 – John Kennedy, 1963-69 – Lyndon B Johnson, 1969-74 – Richard Nixon. Any boomers in that bunch? Shoot, the earliest boomers couldn’t even vote until 1967. So okay, I guess you can blame us for – Nixon? (Probably not, because I suspect that at that time far more “greatest” folks voted than “boomer” folk.
So, maybe you can blame the boomers for the 1970’s! Okay, we have again, 1970 to 74 – Nixon, 1974-1977 – Gerald Ford, 1977-81 – Jimmy Carter. Hmm, no boomers in charge there.
Okay, how about the 1980’s then. 1981-89, Ronald Reagan. Okay, if you want to give me credit for him, I’ll take it. I voted for him twice.
Get the point yet?
We have to get all the way to 1993 before we get a boomer president – Bill Clinton. But hey, under you guys standards, generation X and Y get saddled with him too.
Look folks, I’m not trying to say the boomer generation was perfect. Far from it. It is as imperfect as any individual that is in it. And one thing I know for certain is that the time and circumstances of anyone’s birth are 100% out of your control. So my dander gets up when an entire demographic of people get blamed for the sins of some.
And let me get this straight, “not quite a boomer”:
You would come and *forcibly confiscate* what I have worked for – let me repeat that – WORKED FOR – nearly my entire life – my accumulated pension – (not my social security, even though I worked for that too) and force me to die in penury, just because you think my generation are *all* parasites? Is that what you are saying? Because if that’s so, then all I have to say to you is don’t be a coward. Do your own dirty work. Come show up on my porch and “get some”. You’ll find out that not all of us boomers are who you think we are.
[NOTE from neo-neocon: “not quite a boomer” is obviously a little tyrant wannabe, without a shred of respect for the rule of law or much of anything else.]
not quite a boomer Says:
August 16th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Fair enough. I might be inclined to agree with your proposal if we also eliminate welfare, food stamps, Section 8 housing, and unemployment compensation.
If that means a lot of young people die early as homeless people on the street, then good riddance to ‘em.
It would separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Okay, first let’s clarify. One, I, a very late boomer spent the summer of love in a plastic pool in the back yard, not so drug induced delusion in upstate NY. Second, if you check the birth dates of the losers who ran the “revolution”, say Abbie Hoffman, they weren’t boomers but their older brothers and sisters born in the mid 1930s to early 1940s. The early boomers were just children to be manipulated and many were very good at following the fool. Third, the “boomers” whom everyone speaks of, were an annoying subset of early boomers. Quiet a few of early boomers spent the summer of love in the mud but it had a southeast asian flavor.
In the end, the boomers are just a bubble that cracks the inherent flaws in the liberal fantasy economics. That doesn’t mean the the boomer productive years were distinctly lacking in infrastructure investment but also characterized by a major shift in US economics with the easing of world trade.
Clearly, something happened, something associated with the Baby Boom, that caused massive resentments all around. Hence the bitterness on display in this circular firing squad.
Though technically a Boomer (born in 1960), I share with many late Boomers an experience that is the inverse of texexec’s: cohorts ahead of me clogging up organizations and pushing up prices. I have no great affection for them as a group, and I suspect we will wait in vain for great leaders to emerge from among them. Still, none of us ask to be born when we are.
Perhaps we need to believe in a myth of the Lost Arcadia, a time of innocence when we were taken care of, a time of childhood. And there is something perpetually childish about the story of the Baby Boomers in popular imagination, including their stories about themselves. Maybe that’s what Joni Mitchell (born 1943) meant: “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
Time to grow up. There is a job of work to be done, and if we are going back to the garden, it had best be with shovels in our hands.
I suspect theres never been a generation that would have played the cards dealt to baby boomers any differently. It is the preponderance of human nature to display seemingly courageous self discipline when it is imposed on you. It’s also the preponderance of human nature to abandon it when it is not.
The moral of the story….Work hard for prosperity and pray you never get there.
Sorry, Neo…I should have known you had your facts straight about Social Security. I had just scanned Thomass’ comment and didn’t catch the part about taking Social Security money out of the fund.
What was done during LBJ’s tenure was very very bad.
texexec: no problem—I hadn’t made it completely clear that I was referring to his remarks.
They are certainly a big part of the problem, but there’s plenty of blame to go around for other generations that came later, too, many of whom lived on credit they could not afford and whose whiz kid quants figured out clever mathematical ways to “prove” that none of the bills would ever come due.
nope… it was the boomers, period. they were and are the ones that erased the culture of their parents so that the people you mention that acme later had no such edumacation.
sorry.
they are the generation that were mostly traitors.
it was they who decided communism was what and where to go, made it cool, fasionable, and facilitated it all.
feminists being the leading vanguard…
but i guess we would have to belive their writings the way we believe hitlers mein kampf. that is, after the fact and its all done we then get they were serious and that this is what women made (they certainly didnt stop it, oppose it, or even allow a open discussion without name calling, and tons of other things).
just cause the powerless turned out to have power doesnt mean they are absolved due to ignorance.
life dont care, we dont get second chances, and they sold us down the river for a nothing and a dream they will never get.
just readl lenin, marx, engels, and all those whom they quote… and the progressives and others.
after all, i remember the 60s when the loose hippy chicks were having sex to convert the guys. do you?
sorry… the ones that did it did it… and no one gets a free ticket out for any reason unless they opposed it from day one…
being duped is no excuse, this is life, its serious and as a society we cant afford such idiots anyway. can we?
i dont see anyone fighting against this other than some guys… the girls dont want it gone, they want to pretend they can talk it to a new form while the leaders use them.
put it ALL together on the table at once and there is zero squirm room. only thing you hear are claims of no responsibility, which is keen since thats what the ideologues offered.
turns out they were responsible, gullible, traitorous, and more…
if there is any history in 300 years they will not be remembered kindly, and if not, we will all be slaves disconnected in time with no begining, no end, just a permanent thing like a japanese feudal state where no one changes their born positions
a current generation teaches the next, the future generations are not to blame if the generation in question taught them, lied to them, fixed the outcomes by other means, invented new curriculum, sealed the deal with politically correct thought dialectics, and colluded the end of the US as the ONLY way that women could be free from the oppression of being women as Lenin said… (but did not mean)
they all had other choices, they went with the bonobo herd version of future humanity and raced to the bottom..
As for what happened with Social Security, that started during the LBJ administration. Hardly the boomers’ fault.
sure is…
they had the largest mass of people who could have ended it in the most prosperous times of humankind.
if they wouldnt end it who do you think should have? the way too small populations who cant amass enough votes to opposed the boomers?
demographics…
http://www.ssa.gov/history/chrono.html
take some time, go through it, and you will note if you go through the details, that the lid was blown off by the boomers who were way too large to ever collect
ESPECIALLY when they decided not to have kids, and so sealed the deal.
that is, their failure to stop the program when they decided not to have kids that would fund it, would have been responsible.
but no.. they decided to accept welfare, accept enslaving the future to their wants, self exterminating their family lines, and tons of other things. like changed the school curriculum from what they had, to hide the history they didnt want known.
look at this graph and tell me how anyone after them could change anything?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S.BirthRate.1909.2003.png
Landon Jones, who coined the term “baby boomer” in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1946 to 1964, when annual births declined below 4,000,000
add 18 years to 1946 and what do you get?
the summer of love and the destruction of the american state starts…
at that point they started to bribe the people with their own money since these boomers tuned in turned on and dropped out of society.
their CHOICE…
Seventy-six million American children were born between 1945 and 1964
“almost from the time they were conceived, Boomers were dissected, analyzed, and pitched to by modern marketers, who reinforced a sense of generational distinctiveness.”
Baby Boomers control over 80% of personal financial assets
[and how is everyone else with only 20% supposed to oppose the communist generation?]
more than 50% of discretionary spending power
They are responsible for more than half of all consumer spending, buy 77% of all prescription drugs, 61% of OTC medication, and spend $500 million on vacations per year and 80% of all leisure travel
One of the contributions made by the Boomer generation appears to be the expansion of individual freedom. Boomers often are associated with the civil rights movement, the feminist cause in the 1970s, gay rights, handicapped rights, and the right to privacy
yes, the boomers invited the subversionists in, made them warm and comfortable and we are now going to suffer their asinine choices in which they thought that they new more..
never trust anyone over 30
if it feels good, do it
tune in, turn on, drop out
and who made drugs and that culture normed?
[and then who later to fix the problems they caused created civil forfieture, militarized police, and so on and so forth]
time to read history again in detail
It is incorrect to categorize all baby-boomers as self-serving nihilists.
That characterization only applies to the 30% who identify themselves as ideological liberal.
The rest of us have served and supported our country, our communities and our families faithfully.
Many of us have worked hard to raise children who will likely do the same.
I admit.
I used to bash baby boomers.
As I’ve grown and become more wise – I see generalizations in each generation 🙂
Ha!
But we are all individuals right?
But let’s agree to this… This country has gotten extremely generous with it’s benefits…
There are hundreds of federal programs to help somebody who is poor.
For goodness sakes – there are over 180 illiteracy programs.
You’d think that if somebody wanted to read – they would!!!
But you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
You can type words to a liberal but you cannot make him/her see the common sense (or error of their ways)