A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

The heavy tilt toward senior spending has reduced (for now) poverty among current seniors. Senior poverty rates are now lower than poverty rates for the general population and less than half youth poverty rates.10 That’s fine for the Boomers, but when the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted, benefits will automatically be cut absent drastic political action. Therefore, more future seniors (GenX and younger) will revert to the conditions Boomers have already imposed on the young: a lot of poverty. The rates of senior poverty, driven down to 10 percent by 2014, will after 2034–2037 resemble or exceed today’s youth poverty rates of 21 percent.11 The young will not remain youthful, but many will remain poor. The enrichment of the old at the expense of the young shows the fundamental absurdity about crude fixations on the 1 percent. The 1 percent cannot control a democracy on their own. A giant population of aging Boomers can and has.