Never Trust Anyone Over 30!, or: Boomers Ate My Homework!

Well, let's see:

So if we unseat the boomers from Congress, from state legislatures, and certainly from the presidency over the next three to seven years, then I think we can undo the damage. But that will require a much higher tax rate and a degree of social solidarity that the country hasn’t seen in over 50 years.

Now, the "problem" boomers are, by his definition:

The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.

So that would carry the people born as late as 1958, who will reach retirement age in 6 more years.   But, of course, politicians don't have to retire, so the only recourse is to not vote for anyone over the age of 30, which will make sure you elect millennials, who are the new saviors of the world.  You know, like the Boomers were going to be.

Sorry, Generation X, you get passed over again.  This is a major cohort battle, and you just don't count.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Bruce Gibney is a white guy.  And I'm right!  Not only that, he's a Peter Thiel buddy, a co-founder of PayPal, who now thinks Boomers are all sociopaths because he's looked around and found the world is not as perfect as he expected it to be by now!  Why did I think he was a white guy?  No mention at all of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, multiculturalism, all the social movements that Boomers championed and which Millenials (and X'ers; Gibney is probably an X'er, though he seems cagey about his age.  I can't find even a birth year anywhere on line, in a cursory search) take for granted.  That "social solidarity" he's talking about was what brought about changes in society (and law) that we are still wrestling with.

Not that Sean Illing is a vast improvement:

I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.

Bruce Gibney

I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?

“THIS WAS A FANTASY AND THE RESULT OF A SPOILED GENERATION ASSUMING THINGS WOULD BE EASY AND THAT NO SACRIFICES WOULD HAVE TO BE MADE IN ORDER TO PRESERVE PROSPERITY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.”

Sean Illing

Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social policies.

Let's see:  Gen X started in 1965, ran to 1983, Millennials start in 1984, run to 2002.  The youngest X'ers have been voting since 1983 (Reagan's era), the youngest Millenials since 2002, "elderly" voters from the pre-Boomer generation are still among us (not in vast numbers, true), but all the faults of the nation are on those born between 1946 and 1958?  I think I heard this argument when I was a teenager, right down to the people being blamed.

I think we've found the fantasy and spoiled...well, not generation, surely.

The best part of the discussion between Illing and Gibney is how fact-free it is.  Honestly, some of the stuff Vox posts (most of it Illing's, IMHO) is not worth the pixels it takes to generate it.  Then again, the solution would seem to be to ignore it.  One thing I've learned as an aging Boomer is that the world is full of crap, and the best response to it is not to be a contributor.

Or at least try not to be.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  (It's still Lent, right?  I really should work harder at that.)