Axios - Beset by big college loans, inheriting two wars, and facing an uncertain future of work, a majority of millennials say baby boomers have made things worse for them — and a lot of boomers agree, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll.
The poll found that 51% of millennials (18- to 34-year-olds) blame boomers (51- to 69-year-olds) for making things worse for their generation. Just 13% said boomers had improved things. Generation X wasn't pleased with the boomers, either.
Boomers were split on the issue: 30% said policies created by their generation had made things worse, 32% said they had made things better, and 34% that they had done neither.
6 comments:
As a Gen X'er, I wholly agree Boomers have been the most entitled, selfish, malignant force in the US this century. They inherited a country full of promise: affordable housing, healthcare, higher education and pensions and now all of those things are out of reach for but the top 1%. Sadly, no one asked us when we have been paying student loans for 20 years (at 7% interest), depressed wages, no pension and our own children preparing for college........Good Riddance to the Worstest Generation.
This is totally understandable. The Baby Boom generation is not only the most privileged in US history, but arguably world history. The "intergenerational warfare" that some caution against is a red herring; there's no more chance of that than the New York Yankees playing the Knicks in the Super Bowl.
What needs more discussion are the bread-and-butter policies that made everyday life much easier on Boomers than those that came after; as a Gen Xer, hearing of such things while bitterly struggling to survive was astonishing. And then as now, too many Boomers are oblivious to these realities.
The political inertia that a once-active generation now represents, including widespread support for the nutcase entitlement of the Hillary Clinton candidacy, needs to be called out. And as class warfare goes supernova, Boomers have as much to gain as others. But they have some answering to do, not as an endpoint but the beginning of greater cooperation and unbeatable demographic alliances.
It takes a pretty complete lack of grasp on history to make the claim that, "The Baby Boom generation is not only the most privileged in US history, but arguably world history." Almost every generation in American history has left the country in worse condition than the previous generations. Worse, voting demographics consistently show that an age group is statistically likely to vote, percentage-wise, in direction relation to the group's age: ie. 19% of 19-year-olds vote and 99% of 99-year-olds vote. Likewise, X-gens and Millenials are the voting majority now, but their presence didn't have a bit of effect on avoiding the Trump disaster because they didn't vote. They whined a lot about not having ideal candidates because their grasp on "lessor of two evils" concept is weak, but they didn't vote.
Boomers weathered recessions from bad to Great, beginning in the early 1970's and regularly re-occurring every few years until the Great Recession in 2007. If you don't think that beats down your hopes for a better life, you're even generation-ally dumber than all evidence seems to demonstrate. Having tried to teach Millenials at the college level, I suspect they will be blaming past generations for their problems all the way to their own senility. There is a reason employers and older co-workers consider Millenials lazy, spoiled and entitled, uneducated, unmotivated, and incurious. Their X-Gen and Boomer parents overprotected them from the harsh reality of life in a declining empire and now that they are being forced to live in this rat race they are crawling into their parents' basements and hiding in virtual reality and virtual culture/social media. It might be a decade or so before they discover virtual life stops at the monitor.
Imagining that "class warfare goes supernova" through Facebook and Twitter is a wonderful demonstration of how weak kids are . . . not just today, but historically. For the last 250 years (in the USA), class warfare has been conducted constantly by the 1% and the 99% do their best to keep that minority in power. My parent's generation probably did more than most previous generations to squash majority rule and democracy, creative solutions to cultural problems, and economic inequality. There was a great opportunity to make huge steps post-WWII, but they grabbed hold of the radical right wing flag and waved it from Joe McCarthy to Nixon to Ronald Reagan and left my generation mired in Vietman followed by Reagan's corrupt economic and social disaster.
If you expect 70-year-olds to solve your problems, you're even sillier than I think. After Trump, many of what is left of Boomer progressives are just hoping for the killer asteroid to end this farce of a species.
As a 'boomer', I have seen nothing but the degradation of benefits over the years. The short lived 'progressive' era that started with FDR, slowed in the 1970s and was all but stopped by Reagan era Repugs in the 80s and thereafter.
Wages were stagnated, except for Management (company deduction), Pensions were arbitrarily changed from a 'defined benefit' to a 'defined contribution' so that only those who worked for the company for 'ages' got a reasonable pension. And most smaller companies never offered Pensions - ever.
Take a look at the 'purchasing power' of the average wage from 1970 till now.
To Thomas Day. False.
The Boomers got all the good stuff. Shoveled it up to the top. Left crumbs for their children and grandchildren.
Voting numbers mean nothing when the political system is built for wealth, which (you guessed it!) is held mostly by older people. Take a look at the number of officeholders by age range. Again. Older people.
Then again, it's no wonder why Boomers overwhelmingly voted for President* Cheeto Sweat. Your generation has done nothing but steal resources given to them by their parents and leave everyone else buried in debt by 25.
Boomers were experimental subjects for dosing with LSD, polio shots, gun violence on TV Westerns, rampant bullying, college brainwashing, nuclear war, anti-communism, and were killed in large numbers as expendable extras in a movie called Vietnam. They had been forced to watch the execution of their leader, JFK, watched the executioner's kill shot from the grassy knoll, and then were trained to believe it didn't happen that way. At a critical point in US history they mistrusted the insane LBJ's tortured prisoner HHH, and Nixon was permitted to entrench the coup with a Supreme Court that overthrew the Constitution. Some Boomers left the country, others escaped into the obscurity of family life and personal fortune, as permitted under the military oligarchy. 50 years ago this month boomers worldwide were in solidarity against US and other forms of imperialism. Their revolution in the US was crushed and they have been politically locked down since 1976. They are the last generation to grow up in the old constitutional America, as Garrison said he had thought he was still living in the America he grew up in, and found out that he wasn't. In that America you could still make mistakes, like electing Hoover to be followed by electing FDR. Blaming boomers is like blaming Renfield and not Dracula. Propaganda inaccurately includes the Hiroshima/assassination generation in with the Greatest Generation, all under the umbrella of FDR's America- but that generation's survivors killed the FDR legacy. The Boomers wound up fighting fascism at home and most were done, dead or politically irrelevant by age 25. Theirs was not the New Deal but the Done Deal. Their generation is like that which fought under Lincoln against the British-proxy Confederates only to see the Union sold out to the British by Wilson. For the boomers the Constitution was sold out by Nixon's Court which locked down Congress under plutocratic campaign finance rules.
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