A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

The United States, an “outlier” among developed nations, had an “exceedingly high” rate of child poverty (21 percent), compared to Northern Europe (4–7 percent). Achieving lower rates of senior poverty at the expense of the young, present and future, has been a choice. Per the OECD, US spending on the old outpaces spending on the young by almost 5:1. The ratio will only get worse as more Boomers retire and absorb benefits, a process that will continue as Boomers join entitlements rolls and remain there until the last Boomers die out after 2050.

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.

In theory, trade and immigration bring net benefits, but for whom? Over the very long term, everybody wins, but no voter or politician operates on geologic timescales.

Some existing and many potential jobs from the Rust Belt were shuffled off to Mexican maquiladoras or sent to the nearest thing America had to Third World labor and environmental conditions and biddable politicians, i.e., the Southeast. Detroit aggressively expanded south of the border post-NAFTA, while BMW opened a plant in South Carolina, a state refreshingly light of union laws and pollution constraints and always open to tax and regulatory concessions.19 While trade did cause reshuffling of incomes, some losses were partly offset by increased purchasing power. Prices for consumables from Asia and Mexico fell, and that was fine for middle-aged consumers. Eventually, of course, trade and immigration meant that the prices of services (wages) would follow the price of goods; again, fine, with Social Security on the way. The courses of trade and immigration have not been irrational or unintended. They have been sociopathically perfect as a strategy.

Whatever partisans said, Boomer America wanted these immigrants and the cheap labor they provided, just as they wanted cheap foreign goods. As drug cartels know, where there is demand, there is supply, so immigrants are here, legally and otherwise. It’s incumbent on us to find a decent solution to this Boomer mess, perhaps a modified Bracero project (a migrant worker program that ran from the 1940s to the 1960s) or modest enforcement of tax ID laws. Although Obama made some decent efforts, he was stymied by the Boomer political consensus, whose most energetic propositions boil down to the infeasible and indefensible: walls and look-the-other-way.

Monopolies are inextricably linked to jobs, inequality, and productivity, because abusive monopolies can maintain profitability while firing staff, outsourcing customer service, and underinvesting in their businesses. They are protected by their market power, whether sanctioned by patent law (acceptable) or regulators being forced by Congress to look the other way (less so). Monopolies relate to trade because many justify their existence on the basis that America needs large national champions to compete in the brutal world of free trade. Perhaps so, but this logic more or less guaranteed that the one place monopoly profits would not flow was to employees. After all, part of the justification for size was to compete against cunning foreigners.

Monopolies and oligopolies grew under the Boomers, a product of the corresponding decline in antitrust regulation. The initial deregulatory push began in the twilight of the 1970s and gathered steam under Reagan, though if the original impulse can be set at the feet of a different generation, deregulation’s long continuation and growing consequences are essentially Boomer.

Some of the more abusive participants, as anyone who has interacted with their local (and probably only) cable provider knows, are telecom companies, though high degrees of questionable power now exist in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, retail, beer, and elsewhere.

The Boomers inherited some of the lightest intergenerational burdens in American history and will leave some of the greatest.

The more abstract type of academic philosopher may dismiss economic issues as crass and collateral—how can a national debt, however swollen, compare to a lynching? For a given family, at a given moment, no comparison can be made; doing so would be grotesque. But over time, and on a social scale, economic injustice becomes a wrong of tremendous proportion, and is the more insidious for being less graphic. In a market society, economic justice and economic opportunity are the ingredients necessary to make all other forms of justice truly meaningful and should not be ignored.

Economic injustice is a more roundabout way of disenfranchising people than the Jim Crow laws of old, though it has its own considerable power. It is also not the only way the Boomers have failed to uphold the central principle of democracy.

Erosion in voting-protection laws also keeps the federal government from doing much about scandals like the paucity of voting booths, as in Phoenix, where voters in the 2016 primary had just one polling place per 108,000 residents.12 In a democracy, that is an outrage, though perhaps retired Boomers can afford to wait in line.

LGBT rights have been anything but a Boomer victory. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), granting gays the right to marry, would have come out the other way were it not for the coalition of non-Boomer liberals and Anthony Kennedy.*,25 To ask whether Obama’s tardy support of gay unions gave Kennedy cover or lower courts gave cover to Obama is to miss the point. Obergefell reflected the mores of younger people, not the Boomers. The Boomers remain more ambivalent about gay rights than succeeding generations, as shown in opinion polls and their sporadic efforts to amend state constitutions in gay-unfriendly ways.

Obviously, the struggle for gay rights did not begin and end with Newsom. It stretched back to Stonewall and its many Boomer participants. Then again, it also stretched back considerably further than that, to the Mattachine Society (c. 1950) and its predecessors. All one can say is that the Boomers played a partial and ambiguous part in gay rights, and many have not reconciled themselves to new realities. Americans are obviously free to take whatever position they like on gay rights, with one exception: believing that the Boomers were unalloyed champions of the cause.