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October 8 - November 8, 2018
Boomers had by the early 1990s achieved full institutional power, starting with control of the White House in 1993, half of the House the following term, and by 1995 holding the nation’s top three offices,
Their hold on all three branches of government reached its peak in the mid-2000s, when Boomers made up 79 percent of the House,
But through generational lenses, one sees a smoothly functioning system, consistently delivering benefits to its most powerful constituents.
The parts of government that serve the Boomers must work, and do.
Nowhere did sociopathic avarice, deceit, imprudence, and political power combine more powerfully than in tax policy,
Boomer disdain toward investing for the Posterity cherished by an increasingly obsolete Constitution.
The sociopaths’ goal is to wring every last dollar from the system, and any investment that could not be fully realized within Boomer lifetimes was to be avoided.
Higher education was neglected; the Boomers had their cost-free diplomas in hand, so meaningful reform and costly subsidies were no longer relevant.
climate change is a problem whose consequences will fall most heavily on other generations, so far too little has been done.
Economic decline has been papered over by debt and chicanery, especially on matters of pensions and entitlements.
under the Boomers, American imprisonment rates have spiked to by far the highest rate in any major nation, a terrifying instance of sociopathic hostility.
Prisoners have become the human equivalent of Wall Street’s deferred liabilities, to be released at someone else’s expense once Boomers safely recede into their gated retirement communities.
Boomers committed generational expropriations, the standard will have been satisfied.
Reform and its consequences may be intolerable for many Boomers, who resent putting others’ needs ahead of their own,
As sociopaths cannot be trusted to do the right thing, they must be compelled. America will shortly have the democratic means to do so and should.
Flaubert, the Boomers were happy from the start and this conditioned them to believe effortless, affluent contentment was their due, and they behaved accordingly.
They were, after all, the human instantiations of American optimism. Convention dates the Boom to 1946, though it started as early as 1940, when the Depression fully lifted and Americans were enthusiastic about the future. The Boom continued until the mid-1960s,
Even under the narrowest definition, the Boom produced about seventy-five million new Americans and more than ninety million measured over the full stretch between 1940 and 1964, increasing the population by roughly half.
the long stagnation of the new millennium, the chronic debts and erosion of the middle class, the vanishing species and melting ice caps, the reach of terrorism into the homeland and the shambolic Middle Eastern empire it provoked—these were unimagined, indeed, unimaginable.
The Boomers’ first decades saw rapid and near-continuous gains in prosperity, education, health, technology, and civil justice, the products of revolutionary choices by earlier generations, underwritten by their saving and sacrifice.
a swaddled youth fostered sociopathic entitlement, and the temporary setbacks of the 1970s provoked a generational tantrum from which we have yet to recover.
Boomers have always thought of themselves as Special, and nothing about their childhoods provided any evidence to the contrary.
If the greatest of wars couldn’t restrain American consumption, Boomers might reason, what could?
After World War II, the United States decided on a course of generosity and foresight,
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill) provided veterans with a range of benefits including tuition and living expenses
Congress supplemented the GI Bill after the Korean War, providing further funding to the same general ends.
The creation of a large, well-educated, prosperous middle class, where position could be earned rather than inherited, was in large part a result of programs like the GI Bill and civilian educational grants.
would help the Boomers themselves avoid the sort of crippling debt they forced their own children to incur.
creating NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) to prepare new technological wonders to humble the Soviets.
The government also quadrupled funding for the National Science Foundation,
All of these programs would confer enormous benefits on the Boomers, at a cost disproportionately borne by their parents—a pattern the Boomers inverted and then inflicted on their own children.
like the GPS developed for the military from the 1960s, the Internet developed by ARPA, and the integrated circuit from Jack Kilby’s work for the Army and Texas Instruments.
For mainstream Boomers, childhood through early adult years shared the important commonality that things were both good and getting better; in the event circumstance or chance put prosperity out of reach, the state would ensure that individuals could only fall so far.
Doing so required older generations to tax themselves at rates that no politician today, however far Left, would dare propose.
Motivated by fiscal probity, Americans paid extraordinary taxes for two decades, with the highest marginal rate a downright confiscatory 94 percent in 1945
As a percent of GDP, the deficit was –0.3 percent and the national debt 35.7 percent; modest, compared to –2.5 percent and 103.8 percent, respectively in 2015.
The Boomers inherited a productive family farm with a modest mortgage; in twenty years, their children will take over a crumbling estate leveraged to the hilt.
the Boomers emerged as radicalized adults, rejecting so many of the policies that had given them so much, replacing a successful model with an antisocial failure.
CHAPTER TWO BRINGING UP BOOMER
The Boomers’ upbringings were dominated by a new set of influences, chiefly permissive parenting, bottle-feeding, and television.
If the Boomers grew up to be so different from any generation before them, it was perhaps because they had been raised unlike any prior generation;
Childrearing: Dawn of Time—AD 1946
Should a child survive, parents would set themselves not to the arrangement of playdates and other diversions, but to the production of a miniature grown-up, conformed to adult notions of virtue and industry, ready for near-immediate employment.
Dr. Spock and the Rise of Permissive Parenting
Rigor was therefore the dominant practice for American children until Benjamin Spock changed things in an instant.
A best seller of tremendous proportions, it sold five hundred thousand copies in its first six months, and in the half century following its printing, was surpassed only by the Bible in sales
The defining text of Boomer youth came from Dr. Spock, not Jack Kerouac or Robert Pirsig.
that parents rely on their own instincts and accommodate children’s needs wherever reasonable.
Cultural conservatives predicted that America would collapse in lockstep with discipline’s decline, and they were not entirely wrong.
Peale blamed Spock for helping create the culture of permissiveness in the Sixties,
