A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

What could work is an investment program, much of it administered by the state, initially funded by debt and ultimately paid for by moderate tax increases on most Americans. After years of neoliberal conditioning, such a program may seem irretrievably Leftist, fundamentally un-American, or antithetical to growth; none of these descriptions are warranted. All of these strategies have been pursued before, often quite successfully, and by both parties. Using tax revenues to support even the most expensive and state-centered programs, e.g., infrastructure and defense, would not strike a 1950s Republican like Dwight Eisenhower as creeping socialism, for the simple reason that he did so himself. Doubtless, some of this book’s proposals are to the notional Left of Obama and Clinton; then again, those politicians offered policies that frequently lay to the Right of Nixon, except in certain matters of civil rights. It’s all a matter of perspective, and that perspective should be supplied by data and social consensus, not the idiosyncratic worldview of the shrinking Boomer electorate.