A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Like much of Boomer dialogue, such assertions are mostly self-serving and false.

The Boomers did not pay their fair share of taxes, as the national debt and general decay attest, and Boomers ...

Well, it might be an inconvenience, but it would not be a cruelty, morally or fiscally, and certainly not unprecedented.

Older people do have a lot to tax.

the very Boomer policies designed to protect their generational interests also create many unambiguously legal and fair targets, correlated with age and ripe for harvest.

Indeed, doing so would be downright republican (lowercase), given that low inheritance taxes are oddities in a nation founded, however glancingly, in opposition to inherited privilege.

Even before they change hands, American McDowntons are already protected by some generationally discriminatory exemptions that themselves deserve revision, especially the property tax caps enacted since the 1970s.

long profited from these anomalies at the expense of schools, infrastructure, and the residential aspirations of younger Americans.

So a long-term resident in Malibu might be taxed as if his home were worth $1 million, even if an identical property next door just sold for $25 million and is taxed accordingly.

The usual counterargument is that such revisions will displace seniors who cannot afford to live in the homes of their choice, to which the answer is: tough.

Let us grant the evangelical wish that Washington cease interfering with God’s design, at least on this matter.

Costly interventions to drag a life out a few unproductive months, at the price of a lost generation of children, do not balance in the Benthamite books.

policy that simultaneously requires the government be the single largest buyer of health care while forbidding the state from using its market power to negotiate discounts from the medical oligopolies the Boomers helped create.

Why the middle class should get a break has never been clearly articulated, for the same reason that the definition of “middle class” is never articulated.

the top quintile of earners (households earning an average of about $270,000 annually) paid 69.0 percent of federal income taxes; the top 1 percent alone pay 25.4 percent of taxes.

Populists should keep in mind that a system that is already disproportionately funded by the rich will become ever more captive to them as taxes increase.

After a certain point, extreme progressivity defeats the social purpose it seeks to achieve, reducing society to oligarchy versus mob, with the oligarchy feeling entitled to govern at whim and emotionally justified in evading a burden others do not really share.

The Service estimates that at least $450 billion goes uncollected every year, and even after audits, more than $400 billion that is owed will never be collected.

it would help internalize externalities,

the true social costs of the goods consumed.

The anomalously low price of energy in America fails to capture the total costs fossil fuels create, and a simple way to reduce emi...

All that has to be appreciated is that the scale of the problem defies any cheap fix and that essentially all taxes must rise for some time.

concentrating instead on effective regulation and limiting itself to the various things it does best, like building roads, and schools, and funding basic research, with taxes scaled down to lowest reasonable need.

what the Boomers did to the country was knowing and voluntary, sometimes reckless but often intentional, and they profited from their actions.

While not all of the Boomers directly participated, almost all benefited; they are, as the law would have it, jointly and severally liable.

And given the size of the claim, essentially every Boomer who can pay should. Then again, given the sum involved, so must we all. That is the nature of society, sociopaths be damned.

Permissive parenting soldiers on, though plenty of alternative models have arisen to hopefully better effect.

we want to avoid creating another generation of sociopaths, is providing an education in the value society produces and the thoughtful management of personal choices.

Naïve as it may sound, inoculating society against the antisocial requires, at bottom, persuading people of what is palpably true: that society has value and everyone should contribute.

It has been forty years since the Boomers began accumulating real power and about twenty-five since they gained command of the nation’s highest office and many of its legislatures, and they are still upending the social order in fairly radical ways.

Like all sociopathic revolutions, the Boomer revolution wishes to be permanent and if it cannot manage that, then 2030 or 2040 will do.

The Boomers’ continuing efficacy is reflected in politicians’ ritual obeisance to Social Security and Medicare, now invariably discussed in religious terms like “untouchable,” “inviolable,” and “sacrosanct,”

Tempting as it is to wait for age to do its work, unless action is taken soon, America of the 2030s will understand Hemingway’s dictum about bankruptcy arriving slowly, then suddenly.

Only the problems, more vast and less tractable, will remain.

But younger generations have found nothing to inspire the same sort of devotional interest that makes the Boomers so effective.

Comprehensive reform requires younger generations to align closely, to demolish the entire sociopathic edifice, instead of picking at it one brick at a time.

Entitlements are so large that they essentially determine the budget and the national future, and they are an easy issue to rally around.

abstract popularity across all age groups (thanks in part to Boomer deceit about them) and technical adjustments to retirement ages and payout ratios haven’t aroused mass passion and don’t seem likely to.

What might work is an Other, the common enemy the philosopher Carl Schmitt believed societies needed to push them into decisive action.

Part of my goal throughout has obviously been to establish Boomers as a highly culpable Other, one whose deposition might lead to some real good.

They do not share other generations’ values and do not behave in ways that accord with America’s better conceptions of itself.

Think of Grover Norquist’s dream of drowning the government in a bathtub (or, in less virulent form, Bill Clinton’s declaration that the “era of big government is over”), or the despoliation of the environment, indisc...

Those opportunities Gabler blew, just as the Boomers generally inherited a healthy nation and leave behind one steeped in difficulty.

They were born in the richest and most dynamic economy the world had ever seen, midcentury America. They just did what so many do with lottery lucre: waste it.

America doesn’t have the luxury of patient optimism and nothing about Boomer behavior or pathologies recommends anything less than coercion by the state, democratically authorized.

The Boomers are too old, and benefit too much from their policies, for any of that.

Doing so requires jettisoning the whole disastrous culture of anti-elitism, without abandoning the citizen’s obligation to judiciously select which elite experts deserve credence, an obligation easily met.

It will also be necessary to reacquaint public discourse with nuance and ambiguity, instead of demanding reductive sound bites

However, the trends have been going on for so long and are so pronounced that no reasonable adjustment will change the general conclusion about a distressing deceleration in American growth.

Given the scale of the problems facing the United States, general conclusions suffice.