The obsession of this age is "identity". Everyone must be shuffled into groups and then grievances between groups are invented to the advantage of exploiters, grifters and degenerates. Somehow the answer is always for one group to steal from another group.
There seems little doubt that the US is an oligarchy. That is the norm for democracies, republics and just about every political entity.
In the US that oligarchy is largely a feature of corporatism not generation. It has nothing to do with boomers or blacks or jews or any of the invented letter generational groupings.
I inherited modest sums from my Parents and hope to pass on that inheritance and more to my children.
History hands every generation it's own challenges. The signature trend I've witnessed in my life are the decline of Christian faith in successive generations and the rise of nihilism inspired by scientism.
The central dogma of this age is that there is only matter and energy and we are sacks of meat. Doctrinaire adherents to the religion of this age are even inclined to deny consciousness since it can be neither be defined nor explained as emerging from matter.
Everything else is noise and justification for crime.
" ...the stereotypical boomer insists that hard work and grit ...will overcome any material challenges faced by the younger generations." You make this snide remark as if the truth of the 'stereotypical boomer's' statement should be in doubt to all 'right thinking' people who, of course, are working hard and showing grit as they strive not to BUILD something, but to prove who is more of a victim of the latest trendy oppression than the other.
It’s interesting to me that you leave out the sentence following that remark as if the author made his claim with no evidence:
“Never mind that the number of jobs requiring only a high school diploma has been slashed by more than half since the heyday of the boomers, or that the income gap between mid-career and senior workers has grown by 61% as the portion of the workforce over 55 nearly doubled. A great many of the elderly today cannot and will not accept these facts. “
Why did you snidely comment on this and leave out the evidence?
I left it out high school diplomas because it was meaningless pablum masquerading as data. A high school diploma is near worthless today as we graduate kids reading at fourth grade levels and doing maths around the same. A university degree is the new high school diploma. As for you second point, percentages hide truth. Is it total income across the cohort or individual income? He didn't say, so I didn't opine. But note that the older cohort likely has more money in total because it has more people in it.
And I hope you'll forgive me if you perecieived snideness in my post. It was unintentional.
But this is the exact complaint from younger generations. High school diplomas require no debt but college degrees do. That was not the decision made by millenials or Gen Xers. It was encouraged from a young age to attend college and the degree did not matter. I can remember this from my youth in the 1990s, which was not what my parents experienced. I agree that high school diplomas do not carry the weight they used to carry and standards slipped. This has been a worsening trend since 2012 when PISA scores peaked in the US. But remember it was Bush, a boomer, who signed the No Child Left Behind Act.
As for the older cohort having more money because it has more people--this is also false. Millenials are the largest generation right now, outnumbering boomers by almost 10 million. Boomers though have played the game longer, allowing them to accumulate assets over more years than millenials have. However, millenials point out that the opportunities boomers had are no longer there. I do believe my generation is prone to whining but there are some uncomfortable facts that boomers have to accept:
1. Median home sale prices are currently $403k vs. a HH median income of $83.7k, reflecting a 4.8x sales price to income ratio. Rates are about 6.5%, which is what 2002 levels were. In 2002, the home sales price to household income ratio was 2.7x. To get back to 2002 levels, home prices need to fall 44%.
2. Boomers faced high interest rates in the 1980s but benefited from a huge secular tailwind on falling interest rates
3. The cost of college was much, much cheaper for boomers than millenials
4. Childcare expenses have outpaced inflation. Best example is the dependent care deduction, which was passed in 1986. This was not pegged to inflation and is still $5000. Had this kept up with general inflation, it would be around $17k. Had it kept up with healthcare or childcare inflation, it would be around $31k. Boomers had a much more generous tax code than millenials did.
Everyone has challenges and boomers certainly did. However, there are huge changes we need to make to improve public finances. Boomers have to be a part of that solution and understand how the world has changed since they were parents. Boomers can rage that they were promised by the system to have certain benefits, but that system is headed to insolvency. Boomers are asking millenials and Gen Xers to fall on their sword and pay little to no price themselves. I am not voting for that.
An interesting piece. I have not read the book so cannot testify one way or the other about the reliability of the portrayal by this exposé. I do note that alleged number of illegal immigrants is not 50 million it is more like 11 to 14 million according to my sources.
Hello. I'm old and i don't want to deny any benefits i had to the young. For example, i had the benefit of a 91% tax rate on the rich. That left the government a lot of money to help everyone else. Even after JFK slashed the top rate to 70% we were still able to have Medicare. Even Eisenhower and Nixon supported many social programs. Since Reagan/Thatcher it's gone the other way. Stop spending on wars and make the rich pay their fair share and the problem would be greatly reduced. It's nor the old that's the problem, it's the new division of the money.
Politics aside, the corporate advertising world and every health and fitness industry, be it corporate or just some self proclaimed guru, are all trying to sell you an extension on your time here in this world, where nothing lives forever. Promoting life extension beyond healthy habits is an economy that plays to a buyer’s fear and a seller’s greed…or is it just the lust for more by both parties?
Several comments in this piece require further discussion.
First, who are the 50,000,000 current residents who the other want to leave? The latest government estimate of undocumented residents is 11,000,000. Does he want to deport 39,000,000 of our citizens?
Second, setting work requirements for Medicaid have been tried in the past and have not been successful. They might work if you required single parents of young children and the disabled to work. Is that what the author wants? With the current reductions in Medicaid funding, we are also seeing major problems in maintaining a rural health system.
Third, comparing the cost of Social Security in its first year (when very few were eligible for a payment and today is nonsensical). What exactly, does the author propose doing about Social Security? I do not see conservative Congressman proposing to reduce benefits. We do have to acknowledge that the current payment formula (especially when combined with taxation of benefits) is highly redistributive.
I am sure that Moyn understands the way the Constitution designs allocation of senators. But it would be worth noting that state population ratios were about 12:1 (Virginia to Delaware) in1790. Currently, they are 68:1 (California to Wyoming). This level of inequality far exceeds the inequality that the Supreme Court outlawed in Baker vs. Carr.
As a recipient and long time supporter of the Social Security system (both financially and politically) I recognize that the role that it plays in “income redistribution” is complex.
It is an important element of a principle called the “contract between generations.” The essence of that is that Generation A of working adults implicitly agrees to support Generation B of children through adolescence, and that Generation B in turn implicitly agrees to support Generation A when its members retire.
The Social Security system is one financial mechanism by which the working generation supports the retired generation — by cashing out the credits that members of the retiring generation accumulated during their working years.
The system is somewhat regressive in the sense that the Social Security tax on earned income is a flat one with a cap, but progressive in the sense that the rate of return on “investment“ is higher for lower wage earners than for higher ones. Also, the fact that Social Security benefits essentially become taxed as ordinary income for retirees with higher incomes is progressive, and as such is a form of “means testing.”
It’s not simple, and people proposing either cuts or increases in benefits should acknowledge that reality if they expect to have credibility.
It’s interesting that there seems to be a misapprehension that a sympathetic judge could just abolish the Senate and Electoral College because it obstructs the authors mere opinion that they should. The Baker decision was bad enough as it is.
The obsession of this age is "identity". Everyone must be shuffled into groups and then grievances between groups are invented to the advantage of exploiters, grifters and degenerates. Somehow the answer is always for one group to steal from another group.
There seems little doubt that the US is an oligarchy. That is the norm for democracies, republics and just about every political entity.
In the US that oligarchy is largely a feature of corporatism not generation. It has nothing to do with boomers or blacks or jews or any of the invented letter generational groupings.
I inherited modest sums from my Parents and hope to pass on that inheritance and more to my children.
History hands every generation it's own challenges. The signature trend I've witnessed in my life are the decline of Christian faith in successive generations and the rise of nihilism inspired by scientism.
The central dogma of this age is that there is only matter and energy and we are sacks of meat. Doctrinaire adherents to the religion of this age are even inclined to deny consciousness since it can be neither be defined nor explained as emerging from matter.
Everything else is noise and justification for crime.
I agree with about everything you've said but I doubt any other age didn't think any less in terms of groups.
" ...the stereotypical boomer insists that hard work and grit ...will overcome any material challenges faced by the younger generations." You make this snide remark as if the truth of the 'stereotypical boomer's' statement should be in doubt to all 'right thinking' people who, of course, are working hard and showing grit as they strive not to BUILD something, but to prove who is more of a victim of the latest trendy oppression than the other.
It’s interesting to me that you leave out the sentence following that remark as if the author made his claim with no evidence:
“Never mind that the number of jobs requiring only a high school diploma has been slashed by more than half since the heyday of the boomers, or that the income gap between mid-career and senior workers has grown by 61% as the portion of the workforce over 55 nearly doubled. A great many of the elderly today cannot and will not accept these facts. “
Why did you snidely comment on this and leave out the evidence?
I left it out high school diplomas because it was meaningless pablum masquerading as data. A high school diploma is near worthless today as we graduate kids reading at fourth grade levels and doing maths around the same. A university degree is the new high school diploma. As for you second point, percentages hide truth. Is it total income across the cohort or individual income? He didn't say, so I didn't opine. But note that the older cohort likely has more money in total because it has more people in it.
And I hope you'll forgive me if you perecieived snideness in my post. It was unintentional.
But this is the exact complaint from younger generations. High school diplomas require no debt but college degrees do. That was not the decision made by millenials or Gen Xers. It was encouraged from a young age to attend college and the degree did not matter. I can remember this from my youth in the 1990s, which was not what my parents experienced. I agree that high school diplomas do not carry the weight they used to carry and standards slipped. This has been a worsening trend since 2012 when PISA scores peaked in the US. But remember it was Bush, a boomer, who signed the No Child Left Behind Act.
As for the older cohort having more money because it has more people--this is also false. Millenials are the largest generation right now, outnumbering boomers by almost 10 million. Boomers though have played the game longer, allowing them to accumulate assets over more years than millenials have. However, millenials point out that the opportunities boomers had are no longer there. I do believe my generation is prone to whining but there are some uncomfortable facts that boomers have to accept:
1. Median home sale prices are currently $403k vs. a HH median income of $83.7k, reflecting a 4.8x sales price to income ratio. Rates are about 6.5%, which is what 2002 levels were. In 2002, the home sales price to household income ratio was 2.7x. To get back to 2002 levels, home prices need to fall 44%.
2. Boomers faced high interest rates in the 1980s but benefited from a huge secular tailwind on falling interest rates
3. The cost of college was much, much cheaper for boomers than millenials
4. Childcare expenses have outpaced inflation. Best example is the dependent care deduction, which was passed in 1986. This was not pegged to inflation and is still $5000. Had this kept up with general inflation, it would be around $17k. Had it kept up with healthcare or childcare inflation, it would be around $31k. Boomers had a much more generous tax code than millenials did.
Everyone has challenges and boomers certainly did. However, there are huge changes we need to make to improve public finances. Boomers have to be a part of that solution and understand how the world has changed since they were parents. Boomers can rage that they were promised by the system to have certain benefits, but that system is headed to insolvency. Boomers are asking millenials and Gen Xers to fall on their sword and pay little to no price themselves. I am not voting for that.
An interesting piece. I have not read the book so cannot testify one way or the other about the reliability of the portrayal by this exposé. I do note that alleged number of illegal immigrants is not 50 million it is more like 11 to 14 million according to my sources.
Hello. I'm old and i don't want to deny any benefits i had to the young. For example, i had the benefit of a 91% tax rate on the rich. That left the government a lot of money to help everyone else. Even after JFK slashed the top rate to 70% we were still able to have Medicare. Even Eisenhower and Nixon supported many social programs. Since Reagan/Thatcher it's gone the other way. Stop spending on wars and make the rich pay their fair share and the problem would be greatly reduced. It's nor the old that's the problem, it's the new division of the money.
Politics aside, the corporate advertising world and every health and fitness industry, be it corporate or just some self proclaimed guru, are all trying to sell you an extension on your time here in this world, where nothing lives forever. Promoting life extension beyond healthy habits is an economy that plays to a buyer’s fear and a seller’s greed…or is it just the lust for more by both parties?
Several comments in this piece require further discussion.
First, who are the 50,000,000 current residents who the other want to leave? The latest government estimate of undocumented residents is 11,000,000. Does he want to deport 39,000,000 of our citizens?
Second, setting work requirements for Medicaid have been tried in the past and have not been successful. They might work if you required single parents of young children and the disabled to work. Is that what the author wants? With the current reductions in Medicaid funding, we are also seeing major problems in maintaining a rural health system.
Third, comparing the cost of Social Security in its first year (when very few were eligible for a payment and today is nonsensical). What exactly, does the author propose doing about Social Security? I do not see conservative Congressman proposing to reduce benefits. We do have to acknowledge that the current payment formula (especially when combined with taxation of benefits) is highly redistributive.
I am sure that Moyn understands the way the Constitution designs allocation of senators. But it would be worth noting that state population ratios were about 12:1 (Virginia to Delaware) in1790. Currently, they are 68:1 (California to Wyoming). This level of inequality far exceeds the inequality that the Supreme Court outlawed in Baker vs. Carr.
As a recipient and long time supporter of the Social Security system (both financially and politically) I recognize that the role that it plays in “income redistribution” is complex.
It is an important element of a principle called the “contract between generations.” The essence of that is that Generation A of working adults implicitly agrees to support Generation B of children through adolescence, and that Generation B in turn implicitly agrees to support Generation A when its members retire.
The Social Security system is one financial mechanism by which the working generation supports the retired generation — by cashing out the credits that members of the retiring generation accumulated during their working years.
The system is somewhat regressive in the sense that the Social Security tax on earned income is a flat one with a cap, but progressive in the sense that the rate of return on “investment“ is higher for lower wage earners than for higher ones. Also, the fact that Social Security benefits essentially become taxed as ordinary income for retirees with higher incomes is progressive, and as such is a form of “means testing.”
It’s not simple, and people proposing either cuts or increases in benefits should acknowledge that reality if they expect to have credibility.
It’s interesting that there seems to be a misapprehension that a sympathetic judge could just abolish the Senate and Electoral College because it obstructs the authors mere opinion that they should. The Baker decision was bad enough as it is.