This is absolutely correct. People speak of "The Beat Generation" or "The Lost Generation" or the hippie-dippie flower power generation, but the reality is that 90% of the young people in those generations were just boring square normies.

It's interesting how their love of fake wrestling morphed into a love of fake news.

so true. They identify with the rebels but they were too busy working 9-5 and paying off their house to have 2.5 kids.

A lot of them didn't even identify with the rebels, and some of those probably hardly knew what was happening outside their bubble anyway other than to point at people who dared to be different and laugh.

That's always been the case.

Great! I will start with two.

1) How old were you when you retired?

2) When you managed rental properties in the South Bronx, what was your standard process for lead paint removal?

1. I was in that business for 20 years and I'm going to leave it at that.

2. We rehabed all of our buildings eventually and that addressed the lead paint but, if we hadn't gotten to a rehab yet, we buried it under new sheet rock, which was allowed.

Dear god do i hate whoever told BoredSocial he is thoughtful and clever

My favorite are the old Grateful Dead fans that try and fool them self into believing that the band members were/are libertarians or conservatives.

I love how nobody in this thread defended not at least partially defunding the boomers retirement. Instead you all just freaked out about my clickbait thread title for 80 posts.

My generation has paid drastically more for college, paid drastically more for housing, paid drastically more for childcare, will face global warming head on, and earned way less money than the boomers through this point in our lives.

I'd like to understand why it's fair for me to be expected to pay for the retirement of the people who created this situation. I realize that generalizing an entire generation is kind of crappy, but when you're talking about macroeconomics I don't actually see any other way to deal with it.

Someone is going to have to pay to repair the infrastructure they didn't, build the educational system they didn't, fix the greenhouse gas situation which they didn't... and it's becoming very obvious to me that it's going to be the productive people from my generation who foot pretty much the entire bill. Explain to me why, given all that and our need to raise the next generation we should help the Boomers out at all.

EDIT: I just don't see any practical way to pay for retirement for 70+ Million baby boomers for an average of 15-20 years while simultaneously meeting our obligations for the future. Much of the resources they currently hold are the proceeds of looting every long term investment available to them for short term gain for 30 years. They should pay that back before reaching into my pocket for another dollar.

Because classing an entire group of people based upon the arbitrary number of what year they were born is dumb.

This is a pretty weak argument for me paying way more than my share and them paying way less than theirs. It has already happened to both groups. It's not some sweeping arbitrary generalization it's a factual reality on the ground.

Defunding their retirement is the last opportunity we have to claw back some of the resources they stole. They certainly seem to think it's fine that my entire generation has been systemically screwed. I don't see why they should be systemically blessed at the exact same time.

We live in a society and they did not contribute their share. Generalizing them into a group is way more fair than letting them all off the hook and permitting them externalize all the costs of their absolutely awful turn at the wheel.

A couple points:

Generations are biologically and culturally real. Humans require a certain number of years before reaching sexual maturity and most cultures delay procreation until people are in their twenties or even later. This means that parents and their children are generally a certain range of years apart. Demographers often just treat it as 20, though the mean is likely higher in the U.S.

It's not a stereotype to suggest that a generation--a group of people who experienced cultural and political change together--might have certain broadly identifiable psychological commonalities. #NotAllX in general, and not all Boomers are the same. Many of them haven't compromised their values even as they aged (whether those values were worthy is another question). But I think it's fair in a broad way to hold the generational group that holds almost all positions of power in society responsible for its conditions. It's just that there's nothing much to say about them that wasn't already said better by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism.

Pretty sure civil rights leaders of the 60s didn't say:

"Sorry young people. Marching in the streets with us and holding up signs doesn't count. You need to actually be of adult age in order to theoretically hold office and pass legislation for any credit to be given. We did the math. 1964 - 1945 is at best 19. You also won't get any credit for music, unless its from the 70's which I'm sure will be terrible."

Yea, boomers are pretty awful and also tend to be really dumb, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree when talking about social security. People in this country collectively make twenty trillion dollars a year, one of which goes to social security. Like we stop paying out and collecting social security, nothing would really change. Things aren’t getting better until we actually tax wealthy people.

Most of the boomers you are so upset about don't care if you raid the pension system. They don't depend on it. All that would do is hurt the boomers that worked really hard in ****ty jobs and deserve their pensions. Just tax the wealthy across all generations but somehow that never seems to pass even though plenty of boomers agree with it. So I guess the following generations are just as selfish.

You believe in astrology no matter what you read in that book.

Exactly. Most of the boomers who ruined the country or voted for people who ruined the country can wipe their ass with their $814/month SS check and flush it down the toilet and not even notice it's gone. The only thing OPs policies would do is hurt poor people who actually need the money.

Increasing the inheritance/estate tax is a much better way to go after these people's money.

I think you guys are suffering from a belief in the great man theory of history. The reason things are so screwed up is that the boomers, collectively, voted for politicians who would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. The middle class + poor boomers are as culpable for the sins of their generation as the very wealthy ones.

There will always be people trying to gain advantage through government. The boomers allowed these people to take the government over with barely a whimper.

I'm also strongly in favor of huge inheritance taxes obviously. We definitely start there when it comes time to raise revenue. That doesn't mean we should just say 'ok fine enjoy your retirement' to the normal boomers though. Normal millenials are holy****wtfbbq ****ed. Normal boomers should be too.

And you guys are quite wrong about where I'd primarily cut. Social security isn't and has never been the problem. The problem is Medicare without any form of rationing on elder care.

It (the music) ended up being terrible though. And their leaders took the best situation in human history and in just 30-40 years turned it into a full blown fall of the empire situation by kicking every single can as far down the road as possible to avoid rocking the boat for their corporate overlords.

I'm sorry but for me Donald was the last straw. The boomers are such terrible voters that they have managed to turn democracy into something that can be weaponized against the citizens of this country.

My generation won't be the same. We simply do not have the option. We'd extinguish the human race. So I have exactly no interest in people saying 'blah blah blah you people would do the same'. Maybe so if we had the exact same circumstances... but that cynicism is itself one of the primary causes of the situation we're in, and is a strongly boomer trait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_time

Short term thinking. Everything about the boomers from their economics to their politics was focused relentlessly on getting as much as possible NOW. This was largely true of all of the boomers at all social strata. I honestly struggle to think of instances where boomers sacrificed anything in the short term to gain something in the long term.

My pet theory for why they are this way is that they grew up in a time of incredible optimism. They honestly believe that everything will be fine if they hit the snooze button one more time, because nothing bad happened the first 500 times they hit it.

My generation hit the snooze button 3 times and when we woke up we were 100k in debt with a 15 dollar an hour call center job. Not doing that again lol.

Baby boomers are why Green Book is a Best Picture winner and Black Panther is not.

Lol who would have thought in 2000 when X-Men first came out that we’d have a marvel movie winning multiple Oscars and nominated for best picture of the year. We’ve come a long way. Also, didn’t baby boomers grow up on comic books or was that more generation x?

Comics go way back, but honestly none of this **** was mainstream until studios started pumping out the movie versions in my early-adulthood (late 90s or so).

gen x had graphic novels (lol).