A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

There were two major mechanisms by which Boomer enrichment (and national impoverishment) was achieved. The first was straightforward, a general lowering of tax rates that coincided with both the Boomers’ ascent to political power and the beginning of their prime earning years. The second mechanism required constantly adjusting specific tax policies to favor the interests of Boomers as they moved through their financial life cycles, lowering income taxes during periods where Boomers labored for wages, reducing capital gains taxes as Boomers became stockholders, and limiting and even briefly abolishing estate taxes when Boomers expected to inherit. However, taxes did not always move downward. When Boomers perceived tax hikes to be in their interests, some rates (like Social Security and Medicare taxes) were allowed to rise, though only enough to benefit Boomers, many of whom can expect to retrieve more from the system than they put in, before the system falls apart as the Boomers die off.

The system we have is the system the sociopaths wanted.

Ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 allowed for modern income taxation. Taxes started low and then rose substantially over the next thirty years. After World War II, the highest maximum rates reached 70–91 percent. Were Hillary Clinton to have proposed anything like this level of taxation—levels that prevailed under ur-Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon (both implicitly branded by Norquist as “socialists”)—the DNC would have been the first to rummage up any willing remnants of the Bush dynasty to replace her. The point of this context is not to demand a return to the era of 90 percent taxation, but simply to remind that in the context of present debates, rates of taxation are relatively low in nominal and other terms. Indeed, taxes are too low overall, insufficient to keep the government fully functioning or make essential investments for growth, at least not without major revisions to entitlement programs of which Boomers are and will continue to be the chief beneficiaries.

No generation has been quite so convinced of I’m-paying-too-much than the Boomers, though of course, their dependence on magical thinking and moody hatred of rational argument, combined with the sheer complexity of the tax code, makes it difficult to engage with them on the subject. Nevertheless, the data are what they are and the sheer unsubtlety of Boomerism makes it easy enough to see what is happening—as Boomers became more powerful, their taxes declined.

So Ronald Reagan, the fabled tax crusader, not only increased taxes, but did so several times—just in very targeted ways that happened to coincide with the needs of the Boomers, who were then an enormous fraction of the electorate.

Thus, another modest tax revision allowed the second great Boomer politician to emerge, Newt Gingrich. The commonalities between the two sociopathic Boomer chieftains is striking—age, philandering, murky financial dealings, ethics violations, tax avoidance, dramatic censures (the second impeachment of a president, in Clinton’s case; the first official reprimand of a Speaker of the House, in Gingrich’s), a premature graying of hair entirely understandable in light of the foregoing—really, they could have been the best of friends.

Notwithstanding all these tax cuts, the government has not simply evaporated or been cut in half, although that was the stated intent of the 1980s tax revolution. Returning to Grover Norquist, the purpose of the tax revolt was to starve the government of revenue so that it would shrink back to its size around the turn of the last century, making government small enough “to drown it in a bathtub.”41 (The government is not a person, but metaphorical murder of an institution that embodies society does reek of sociopathy.) The reason Norquist has succeeded in lowering tax rates but not abolishing the government is that people like the benefits each provides and will not part with either. This presents a certain mystery about mechanisms—if taxes fell, how could government soldier on? Partly, the government borrowed heavily;

In 1780s, three major countries faced debt crises: the United States, Great Britain, and France. The Anglo-and Francophones realized dramatically different outcomes. In the confederated United States, debt had been a mess of state obligations; after the Constitution was ratified in 1788, Hamilton federalized these debts and began repayment, which reassured creditors and eased the flow of funds. As a result, despite its youth and tenuous position, the United States had access to essential finance.

That is why Greece, which had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 118 percent in 2008, collapsed into chaos in 2009, spawning a quasi depression that continues still. The Greeks had no credibility when it came to payment, so bankers called in the loans. Meanwhile, Japan experienced no crisis despite having debt-to-GDP ratios significantly higher than pre-crisis Greece; China, too, had very high levels of aggregate debt and no crisis.11 Not only were these non-Hellenic countries in better economic shape, they also had political systems that seemed, at least in the eyes of lenders, capable of keeping their national finances together. It helps that these Asian nations, unlike Greece, owe much of their debt to their own citizens, rather than unforgiving foreign parties, like German bankers keen on schuld und rechnung. (For context, the United States owes foreign parties $6.2 trillion, about a third of its total debt, which doesn’t mean that “China owns the US” as some cruder thinkers have it, though it does mark a substantial increase from the roughly $1 trillion owed to overseas creditors as of 2001.12) It’s worth noting that a major component of Greece’s dysfunction was a twinned inability to generate tax revenue and to reform its overgenerous entitlement system—a situation well underway in the United States.

Even the federal government has flirted with debt crises, in 1995 and, more dramatically, in 2011, when it came within forty-eight hours of a technical default on its interest payments. In that second crisis, three agencies issued warnings about American credit, with Standard & Poor’s actually cutting its rating of US Treasuries for the first time.14 Yet another debt crisis emerged, on the same lines, in 2013. Although these were major events at the time, people quickly forgot.

However, since 1980 the United States has been committed to a combination of stable-to-lower taxes and ever-higher spending, even as growth has decelerated, and this has led to much larger deficits and a growing national debt. It’s entirely clear from the next chart which generations are responsible: Some blame lies with the Boomers’ parents, but the substantial majority rests squarely on the sociopathic shoulders of the Boomers themselves.

The debt began really growing in the 1980s, substantially the product of tax cuts whose goal was to “starve the beast”—the beast being the government generally and its social welfare system in particular.16 Not surprisingly, social programs failed to vanish in response to tax cuts.

As a result, the United States now has its largest peacetime debt, one that it will grow substantially, gross and as a percentage of GDP, for the foreseeable future.

Infrastructure demands providence and sharing; sociopaths offer imprudence and shortsighted self-interest, and that translates to neglect. Excluding national defense, gross total infrastructure spending has been falling for some time, to about 2.5 percent of GDP, significantly less than the United States spent in the 1960s (around 4 percent) and less than what many of America’s industrialized peers spend today.3 The situation in publicly funded infrastructure is especially alarming. Larry Summers, president of Harvard and a former Treasury secretary, argued that net government investment was zero, adjusting for depreciation (roads do wear out). Zero was only the slightest exaggeration: it was, under the most generous calculations, 0.5 percent of GDP in 2014 (versus around 3 percent at its midcentury height).

You can simply observe the various casualty-producing fireballs that emerged in 2010 and 2014–2015 from California’s mismaintained, fifty-year-old pipelines; the poisoned water in Flint, Newark, and elsewhere; sundry train derailments; and (per Joe Biden) “Third World” conditions prevailing in the cesspit that is LaGuardia Airport.5 While the Boomers grew up in a country that had the world’s greatest infrastructure, they now run a nation where infrastructure ranges from frustratingly backward to downright unsafe.

For sociopaths, indifference to infrastructure has a certain logic. Bridges and waterworks take years to complete and often decades to return investments. What little interest the Boomers had in infrastructure therefore dwindles with age, especially if such investments risk the entitlements budget. As long as Boomers control government, there will be no smart grid, no public hyperloop, no wholesale move to clean power, not even appropriate maintenance.

Therefore, unlike Social Security payments, infrastructure is not so much a consumption expense as an investment, and a good one.† The consensus from diverse sources like the IMF, the CBO, private financial institutions, and so on, is that for each new $1.00 invested, infrastructure generates about $1.40 to $1.80 over time.11 Though the precise variables and conditions are complex, the general conclusion is not. Infrastructure is money well spent, unless a country is already richly endowed, a status the Boomer United States does not enjoy. And while infrastructure provides returns over decades, some benefits can be had almost immediately. Building provides middle-class jobs and favors workers who have recently been underemployed, including certain minorities and the large pool of laborers without higher education.

In 2015, 260 million American vehicles traveled 3 trillion miles and consumed 173 billion gallons of fuel.13 It’s 3 trillion miles of frustration: congested roads force Americans to waste 5–7 billion annual hours in traffic, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars in lost output, wasted fuel, and accidents.14 Given that America is a car culture and will remain so for decades, it’s frustrating that the roads are so inadequate.

Starved by Boomers of funding, transportation agencies have been unable to repeat the canal, railroad, and highway revolutions overseen by prior generations. The Interstate Highway System was largely finished by the 1970s and 1980s, and Congress washed its hands, not even bothering to push through the final few miles of the system scheduled for completion in the early 1990s.

America can expect no improvement under the Boomers. When Amtrak recently offered a true high-speed option, to debut in 2040, one Amtrak vice president admitted: “There is no mechanism at the federal level to support this today.”32 Amtrak did announce it was buying newer and faster cars to replace an aging fleet, which will do little unless track stock is upgraded. The American rail system is a bizarre experience for foreign visitors. France has had high-speed trains since 1981, with speeds now averaging over 170 mph on the best lines and despite its imperfections, its system usually has positive margins and offers smooth rides.33 Japan is set to introduce 300 mph trains.

Though famously large, American military spending has been falling dramatically during Boomer tenure. Nominal defense spending is about $600 billion, but measured as a fraction of GDP, defense spending has fallen from an average of 7.9 percent of GDP from 1950 to 1985 to 4.1 percent during the following three decades of Boomer domination. Cuts and sequestration have driven recent spending even lower, to about 3.2 percent of GDP in FY 2016, projected to fall to 2.6 percent by 2026.

Some on the Right question whether government is competent to be in the infrastructure business; perhaps all the extra money will just disappear into the vast maw of mismanagement. Some on the Left question reliance on for-profit businesses citing, e.g., the privatization of Bolivian waterworks whose mechanics were so suspect that they provided the template for the Bond movie Quantum of Solace. These are interesting academic questions and helpful at the margins. They are also of little practical relevance. The government is the only entity that can organize, pay for, and/or inspect a lot of critical infrastructure and by practical necessity, it relies on private enterprise to carry out its plans.

The Empire State Building took 410 days to complete; One World Trade Center took about seven years.

The sociopaths ran down infrastructure to help pay for tax cuts, and, unless they’re stopped, they will run it down further to pay for their retirements. They failed to capitalize on the enormous, positive-return possibilities of proper investment and maintenance. The facts would astonish any thinking citizen.

Boomer financial culture operated contrary to prevailing mores while evading, watering down, and sometimes gutting the regulatory framework established by their parents. The result has been a scandalous samsara of fraud, abuse, and bailout.

Nevertheless, just as Boomer Donald Trump parades his business expertise as a political qualification notwithstanding the financial catastrophes at his casinos, so too did the architect of the Compaq deal, Boomer Carly Fiorina. Briefly a presidential candidate, Fiorina glossed over the price shareholders paid for her bad decisions, perhaps remembering only the handsome payout she received on being fired. That was not Fiorina’s only scandal at HP; there were also the iffy sales of equipment to an embargoed Iran during her tenure, though perhaps that counts as a “foreign policy credential.”

By the 1990s, Congress was firmly in the hands of the Boomers and could be counted on for two things: (1) watering down regulations, and (2) providing bailouts should anything go wrong.

When the Fed does make mistakes, it rarely admits them and only after a suitably sanitizing interlude, as with Bernanke’s public dismay at the bank’s response to the Great Depression, seven decades after the fact. While the Fed might be entitled to the benefit of the doubt, it should never get the sort of uncritical deference that prevailed from the 1980s to the 2000s, when it was viewed as some sort of economic magician.

Moreover, because the Fed has a mandate to protect the economy overall and its tools work best in the short term, it tends to protect the largest classes of interests extant at any given time at the expense of the long view. For the past thirty years, that has meant a bias toward protecting the financial well-being of Boomers.

From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, home prices grew roughly in line with the economy. After 1997, when almost all the Boomers who wanted to purchase housing had already done so (the youngest were by then thirty-three and the oldest, fifty-seven), home prices rose dramatically. It’s not that growth in the economy or population accelerated suddenly or permanently. The better explanation was government subsidy. The Boomer-controlled government expanded housing subsidies during the Boomers’ prime home-owning years: property tax caps, mortgage interest deductions, tax exemptions on sales, and so on all favored existing and wealthier homeowners.

FDR may have hoped Social Security would be self-sustaining and perhaps eventually redundant, but this has not happened, and not enough money has been allocated to cope with that reality.

Boomers will resist any changes to their benefits. They can, and will, endorse changes to retirement age and FICA taxes—after all, these will fall almost entirely on younger groups and will be of no consequence to the Boomers themselves. So the generational inequities, already significant, will deepen.

It’s almost impossible for anyone under thirty-five to imagine a time when the United States was an international leader on environmental matters, much less that it achieved this status under Republican administrations, even when economic and political costs were significant. Nevertheless, that was the case, once upon a time. In the past, environmentalism was sometimes forward thinking, and at other times, a response to imminent catastrophe. Overall, motivations were generally good and so were the results. It was only during Boomer hegemony that American policy became recklessly indifferent to threats that are simultaneously more dangerous and, paradoxically, that we have vastly greater resources to confront. Those who argue that climate change, the major existential threat of our time, cannot be tackled by a national system prone to partisanship, indifference, and inability to wrangle multilateral solutions ignore a long and successful history of American environmental leadership in equally difficult circumstances.

By 1872, the Grant administration had designated Yellowstone the nation’s first national park. It took Canada thirteen years to follow, and Europe about thirty more; the situations have reversed, and the American government is now usually in the rearguard.

Grant’s fellow Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, expanded the National Forest system, eventually protecting some 230 million acres in total (the modern United States covers about 2.3 billion acres).3 Democrat Woodrow Wilson signed legislation formalizing the National Park system. These were positive, inventive, and international examples and even in a vast and thinly populated country, they represented a sacrifice for a nation obsessed with industrialization and expanding frontiers.

Before 1991, environmental bills were generally passed with bipartisan support and were signed into law by presidents as ideologically diverse as Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Bush I.

As the Boomers became Washington’s most lethal invasive species, environmentalism waned. The CAA has not been meaningfully amended in twenty-seven years.

What accounted for earlier achievements? Certainly, the absence of Boomer power helped, but former success did not come simply because it was easy. In the early years of the environmental movement, the United States was more dependent on heavy industry than it is now. And the United States of 1960 was neither as rich nor technologically advanced as it is today, making the costs of environmental regulation proportionately higher. It is true that conventional pollution then was more tangible to voters than invisible and incremental warming is now. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio repeatedly burst into flames due to industrial pollution, for example, which proved hard to ignore. Nevertheless, the CAA regulated both visible and invisible pollution, at considerable cost to living taxpayers (having been passed before the era of unrestrained intergenerational reshuffling via debt). The older generations paid up and cleaned up, even when legislation might never have direct or obvious benefits for those footing the bill.

America’s failure to confront warming is a product of unrestrained consumerism, the anti-empirical and hysterical rhetoric of the Boomer Right, and the unreconstructed, antitechnological Boomer Left, and endlessly confounded by a bipartisan machine that resists sacrifice—namely, Boomer sociopathy.

Alexander Graham Bell worried about an “unchecked greenhouse effect” as early as 1917.

For sociopaths, the timing mismatch makes climate reform a nonstarter. Boomer views about the science of climate change may be divorced from reality, but their other views are narrowly rational and consistent. They are just not empathetic or forward thinking.

It is not only chaos abroad that concerns; American naval bases are already at significant risk of flooding.

It may seem odd to mention the arcane world of stem cells in a chapter about existential issues, but stem cells are existential, at least for individuals. If the therapies work, people live longer; if they don’t exist, people die. And stem cells are but one example of potential and serious losses due to underfunded science.

Regrettably, the Boomers do not take AI seriously, in part because many of them do not understand technology well enough to understand the threat it poses.

While society had better options, the Boomers favored ever-stricter laws and processed ever more people into the prison system, the spectacle of law and order always being more satisfying to Boomer psychology than any reality of justice or efficacy. While Reagan often gets the blame for the rise of imprisonment, it was Boomers who (frequently in bipartisan accord) passed the most odious laws and Boomer administrations that presided over the most spectacular and fruitless phases of mass incarceration.

Crime rose until 1991, after which Boomers had begun to age out of the brackets most liable to commit crimes. (Notably, the large Millennial generation does not seem as disposed to crime as its forbears.)

Beyond normative issues, this massive prison population is an economic liability. Prisoners produce almost no economic value and are expensive to house (though private prisons have partly offset costs by monetizing inmate labor, a situation uncomfortably close to slavery).

The Brennan Center noted that an “aging population” contributed somewhat to the decline in crime. Young people historically have a greater propensity to commit crime, but the arrival of the very large Millennial generation prompted no crime wave, nor was there anything comparable before the 1960s. The Boomers may be more entangled than anyone realized. After all, something changed from 1967 to 1991, and we will pay the price for decades to come.

Inequality is a consequence of a capitalist system for which there is no replacement, as the utter failures of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Soviet Union showed (many of which proved that “communist” regimes also had extreme inequality). Deng Xiaoping, himself the leader of a then socialist state, realized this decades years ago and loosened the communitarian leash on Chinese entrepreneurship. Whether Deng actually said “to get rich is glorious” or openly acknowledged that some people would “get rich first,” that’s been the People’s Republic’s modus vivendi ever since, and successful (so far).

Capitalism is, if not a perfect machine for generating general prosperity, then the best one yet devised and the only one conceivable in America.