patrick.net

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/02/26/how-baby-boomers-destroyed-everything/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170303&utm_campaign=ritholtz#comments

"Even before the election, Americans were asking just how we got here — to this sullen moment of national reckoning....

...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..."