A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Therefore, absent a nuclear option like default, compelled purchases, or debasement of the currency, the bond market will exercise greater control in the coming years than it has in the recent past, and the cost of American debt could rise substantially.

More recently, debt has become harder to discharge (now that wealthier Boomers have become net creditors).

Donald Trump, the only person to make Silvio Berlusconi seem Churchillian, manages to be personally wealthy while presiding over a ramshackle real estate empire whose only products are architectural vulgarity and serial bankruptcies.

The Boomers have habituated the nation to debt and default.

One of the 2005 law’s most significant changes made discharging student debt exceedingly difficult.

The Boomers did not have to worry, as formerly generous subsidies meant they carried relatively little of such debt.

with interest remitted to companies in which Boom...

After 2005, student debt would fall into the same legal category as debts like criminal p...

Because interest rates remain low, the debt crisis probably will not emerge until the Boomers are near their ends.

Boomers have no personal incentive to address debt and have shown no appetite for doing so.

Infrastructure demands providence and sharing; sociopaths offer imprudence and shortsighted self-interest, and that translates to neglect.

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.

In 2001, ASCE estimated the United States needed to invest $1.3 trillion to bring infrastructure up to snuff over five years; by 2013, rising demand and increasing neglect drove the price up to $3.6 trillion through 2020, significantly higher on an annualized basis.

it would be almost impossible to achieve an “adequate” grade by 2020 even if the Boomer machine wanted to, which it does not.

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.

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.

As usual, the problem stems from sociopathic improvidence.

Technology may only exacerbate the disconnect, because if electric cars are ever widely adopted, their use will only expand funding gaps; e-cars are literal free riders.

In forty-one states, the total real gas tax (state plus federal) was lower in 2015 than in 1993.

The federal Highway Trust Fund, in positive balance since its establishment in 1956, went bust in 2008, requiring subsidy from general revenues.

Starved by Boomers of funding, transportation agencies have been unable to repeat the canal, railroad, and highway revolutions overseen by prior generations.

average annual traffic delays per motorist rose from eighteen hours in 1982, the same year Boomers became an electoral majority, to thirty-seven hours by 2000 and then to forty-two hours by 2014.

Despite being tiny and rich, San Francisco has appalling roads; its political opposites, Dallas and Phoenix, have horrible traffic.

Roads are bad enough, and Congress likes cars; Congress hates rail, and it shows. Although fast trains are economically viable in populous regions and also ecologically sound, America has no high-speed trains worthy of the name.

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.”

The rest of transportation infrastructure is no better: airports are bad (D), mass transit is bad (D), inland waterways are worse (D–) and each of these experienced significant declines from 1998 to 2013.

Essential for the import of consumer necessities, these structures have received some attention and earned one of transportation’s outstanding grades, a C.

The Constitution grants the power to provide a “common Defense” in Article I, Section 8, the same provision that allows Congress to provide roads.

(The full name of our highway system is the “Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”).

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.

The Boomers’ decision not to invest in the military has, and will continue to have, consequences.

While optimists invoked (part of) Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” to contend that all nations would transition to liberal, Western, and presumably nonhostile democracies,

The United States has been more or less continually involved in military actions of some kind since Independence, and it can no more plausibly forgo conflict than the Romans could close the Gates of Janus with any sincerity.

The charitable might wonder how the Vietnam generation managed to embroil themselves in endless conflicts while simultaneously running down the military.

The seventeen or so military conflicts under Boomer leadership were just the natural products of expediency and sociopathic hostility; military decline the result of improvidence and selfishness.

That it will take another five or ten years, perhaps longer, to rebuild a military depleted by Boomer adventurism and neglect simply demonstrates the irrelevance of doing so to a sociopath of dwindling years.

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 original San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge took about three years to complete and cost about $1.4 billion in today’s dollars;

the replacement of just its eastern span took eleven years, cost at least $6.5 billion, required immediate re...

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

the impact of a solar plant on local birds instead of maximizing the existential threat of climate change that threatens all birds.

While Jacobs then had the better of the argument, a degraded version of her mantle has been assumed by Boomers who refuse to consider change to their personal quality of life as a matter of fixed principle.

Boomer bourgeoisie stasis must give way to forward thinking.

We simply need to exercise the constitutional means of eminent domain and let a few homeowners stew in favor of the greater good—people

Unfortunately, the Boomer refusal to engage with evidence, to take the long view, or to measure outcomes other than through the tiny aperture of immediate self-interest has made large projects difficult, but not impossible—America

The Boomers did not inherit a perfect system from their parents, but it was a very good one, certainly better than the rapidly decaying legacy and mounting bills...

They failed to capitalize on the enormous, positive-return possibilities of proper investment and maintenance.

And therefore, the conduct of Boomer policy required the elimination or repackaging of those facts and all the other inconveniencies generated by Boomer policies.

BOOMER FINANCE: THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF RISK AND DECEIT

Another significant explanation is that, in classic sociopathic fashion, the Boomers have engaged in a campaign of deceit, reaching into their wunderkammer of generational duplicity to offer consoling fictions to the population they govern.