A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

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.

The 1 percent cannot control a democracy on their own. A giant population of aging Boomers can and has.

Jobs have been created, but not all jobs are created equal, and quite a few do not provide the opportunity to work as many hours as people would like or need.

The gig economy and other “alternative work arrangements” accounted for quite a lot of recent job growth, probably at least a third of all jobs created, and per preliminary findings by Harvard’s Lawrence Katz and Princeton’s Alan Krueger,

America made itself less competitive after the war than it could have been.

America did enjoy one immediate benefit of European chaos: the mass immigration of highly talented Europeans to the safety of the States.

S&P 500 has experienced better profit growth than revenue growth over long periods (notably, after 2008).

(which boosts earnings per share without increasing the intrinsic value of the business).

though high degrees of questionable power now exist in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, retail, beer, and elsewhere.

In the land of endless choice, you may select from many different brews, but not many different brewers.

Wal-Mart, within fifteen minutes’ reach of 90 percent of Americans, to select from many different beers, almost 80 percent of which are likely to have been produced by only two...

For the temperance minded, online giant Amazon can ship you a soda produced by duopolists Coke or Pepsi, made with high-fructose syrups derived from corn seeds provided by oligopolists like Monsanto

Sanders was correct that the most urgent sector for reform in the past two decades has been finance.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE MYTH OF BOOMER GOODNESS

A little contrition might recommend sympathy to a generation sorely in need of some, while new management might finally begin to address the accumulated problems of the Boomer years.

Reality has forced a few Boomers to express retrospective doubts about their generation’s actual virtue

These turncoats are exceptional cases, and most Boomers retain an unshakable faith in their moral credentials, credentials that cancel any obligation to atone.

If anything, the sociopaths believe it is we who should be thanking them, our betters, without the ungrateful backtalk.

First, the Boomer propaganda department has so assiduously promoted Good People branding that many people accept it (once, even I believed it).

Economic justice is where the narrative of Boomer morality breaks down completely.

What has not been debated as thoroughly is intergenerational inequality,

The mechanisms of perpetual national debt and the deferred obligations of pensions, environment, infrastructure, and so on do allow debts to be passed along.

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

intergenerational injustice affects not only most Americans now living, but all those yet to be born.

It is very hard for one generation to engage in the “pursuit of happiness” if it is busy paying the bill for another generation’s sociopathic pursuit of the same.

Economic injustice is a more roundabout way of disenfranchising people than the Jim Crow laws of old, though it has its own considerable power.

In the Boomer years, however, the VRA has been eviscerated by the Supreme Court, with the implicit consent of Congress.

Chief Justice John Roberts (a Boomer, appointed by a Boomer, and confirmed by Boomers) effectively gutted the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a decision Roberts wrote himself.

as in Phoenix, where voters in the 2016 primary had just one polling place per 108,000 residents.

There have been other antidemocratic frustrations, like the antique rules surrounding the party system, baroque arcana fit for the Holy Roman Empire.

Companies Are People, Too

Even as the Boomers eroded the franchise of many human persons, they vigorously expanded the power of money and corporations, reversing a series of reforms enacted between 1905 and 1975.

subverting the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Most conceptions of “goodness” involve fairness, and fairness has not been a Boomer priority.

best, Boomers failed to maintain the pace of gains prevailing before 1970.

Boomers have begun to actively thwart progress.

We have seen how the Boomers have failed on almost every important issue they had the power to control, and how in many cases, they did so out of pure self-interest, to enrich themselves and preserve their own power—in

The first step is to appreciate when the elderly are no longer competent and to remove from them the ability to harm self or others, or run up any more debts.

the second mortgages, inadequate insurance, accumulating doctors’ bills, leaky roofs, the lot of it.

Proper investment enriches society over the long run.

By virtue of their age, Americans in midlife have substantial incomes, making them prime targets for new taxation, while also being sufficiently old to make full recoupment unlikely.

They will be called upon to do much, and they deserve an honest treatment of what needs to be fixed and how much that will really cost.

The old practice of subsidizing transient consumption with perpetual debt needs to go.

Returning Social Security to long-term balance requires moderate increases to FICA taxes and minor increases of the retirement age to reflect increased longevity

The cap-and-trade programs implemented to deal with acid rain in the 1990s provoked no recessions and California, which has had its own carbon cap-and-trade program in effect since 2012–2013, is prosperous.

Because debt is presently so cheap and many of the largest challenges like Social Security and climate have costs that can be spread over many years, some of the largest problems are actually the easiest to address,

The Harder Adjustments: Healthy Debt, Tax Increases, Benefit Cuts, and Avoiding Waste

Total tax receipts in the United States are close to $7 trillion across federal, state, and local, taxes, so meeting new expenses implies a relative tax increase of 21–25 percent, substantial but not unbearable.

For average taxpayers, their effective 15 percent rate would creep up to 18 percent or slightly higher.

Seniors—i.e., Boomers—will view higher taxes as an unfairness not to be borne and the prospect of reduced benefits as an outrage;