If you hate Baby Boomers, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America will push you over the edge to calling for death panels.
Bruce Cannon Gibney diagnoses Boomers as sociopaths, referring to the DSM-V’s description of antisocial personality disorder which describes Boomers perfectly: ego-centric, goal-setting based on personal gratification; lack of concern for the feelings, needs or suffering of others; incapacity for mutually intimate relationships (indicated by promiscuity and divorce); irresponsibility, impulsivity, manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, and hostility.
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A Generation of Sociopaths details the various areas in which Boomers, born between 1940 and 1964, have made America a worse place than what they inherited—and as they become seniors their parasitic leeching off the backs of the young will only get worse. Gibney delves into infrastructure, the housing market, college education, the job market, family life, the environment, and retirement benefits in presenting his well-researched case.
Gibney certainly comes across as a liberal, but he’s adamantly against neoliberalism. He despises Trump, but also Hillary. His analysis and prescriptions for how to save the future for younger Americans is well-thought out, with a few exceptions—nothing at all like the typical political talking points.
Family and Home Life
Boomers had childhoods similar to Leave It to Beaver. Dad made enough money to support his family, with Mom typically at home, cooking from scratch and available to the children. Schools were safe, and towns were safe for children to ride bikes, go fishing till dark, or hang out at the soda fountain.
Boomers made more money than their parents but their family life devolved into divorce at astounding rates. The divorce rates appear to be caused by putting personal satisfaction over the needs of children: In 1962, half of women thought that people should stay married for the kids’ sake (still shockingly high); by 1980, only 20 percent thought so. Gibney writes:
Many Boomer divorces, therefore, were examples of self-interest trumping empathy, where the interests of parents outweighed the as-then-understood needs of their children.
Thus, many children of Boomers became latchkey kids living off of junk food. Boomers’ children were sent to failing, often violent, schools. The TV eventually consumed 50 percent of Americans’ free time.
Raised within the comforting community of a mainstream church, Boomers abandoned the practice for their own children. Those that kept the faith flocked to crazy churches, like those preaching the “prosperity gospel.” Rather than a values-driven Christianity, Boomers turned to “God-as-vending-machine . . . all the salvation with none of the guilt, a doctrine of consumption instead of charity.” The children of Boomers led an atomized existence even in childhood.
Education
Back when the Boomers were in school, perhaps they didn’t have a variety of foreign language options or art classes, but students graduated literate and ready to go into either the workforce or college. Now, it’s an almost universal agreement that high school alone isn’t enough to prepare students for the workforce, and even kids with college degrees have trouble finding good jobs.
Gibney describes how the Boomers benefitted from near-free college educations. Even STEM degrees were low-cost, in part thanks to generous subsidies. But when it came to their Gen X and Millennial children, costs were high and, “especially at graduate levels, the enrollment of foreign students has been an important driver of STEM education, and foreign students account for a majority of graduate students in critical programs.”
Those that had college loans entered a job market with good-paying salaries and opportunities for advancement. Those that couldn’t make it could eliminate student debt via bankruptcy, something eliminated in 2005 after it no longer applied to Boomers.
Unlike virtue-signaling Democrats, Gibney doesn’t support universal college education, considering it unachievable due to aptitude and economics. He advises dividing children into vocational tracts suited to children’s abilities. In fact, he says Obama’s call to get more teens into “some college” has only degraded college to remedial work and led to 40–50 percent of professors now being grossly underpaid adjuncts teaching what students should have learned in high school. Tenure is out of reach for many young professors, given that the tenured Boomers seem determined to keep their high-paying cushy jobs, even in fields like STEM where they’re out of touch with what students need to know in today’s market.
With the increase of adjunct professors has come another set of new jobs in colleges—highly paid administrative positions overseeing new departments (part of the reason costs have skyrocketed). And who staffs those six-figure administrative posts that have nothing to do with teaching? Mostly Boomers, of course.
Employment, Housing, and the Markets
Boomers benefited from some of the greatest runs in history in almost every area. Their jobs were relatively easy to come by and paid well. It helped that housing costs were low and health insurance cheap, so money went further.
Fast forward to today’s workers and the picture is completely different. Millennials don’t need to “work harder”—the jobs literally don’t exist. Harvard’s Lawrence Katz and Princeton’s Alan Krueger found that 94 percent of net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005–2015 occurred in “alternative work arrangements.” Conservatives were right when claiming that Obama’s jobs numbers were bunk.
Boomers were able to buy into the stock market when stocks were cheap, and are now cashing out when the market is high. Will the market keep going up indefinitely? According to Boomers, yes, but only time will tell.
Other options for investment—for the non-savvy mainstream consumer—have all but dried up for Gen Xers and Millennials. Interest rates were high—as Boomers often remind their children who complain of high housing costs—but that meant Boomers could take advantage of investment options like CDs and even simple savings accounts. Gibney notes that the same applies to bonds, “with the additional difficulty that if interest rates should ever rise, the value of existing bond portfolios will fall.”
Housing was another area where Boomers scored big:
From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, home prices grew roughly in line with the economy. After 1997, when almost all the Boomers who wanted to purchase housing had already done so (the youngest were by then thirty-three and the oldest, fifty-seven), home prices rose dramatically. It’s not that growth in the economy or population accelerated suddenly or permanently. The better explanation was government subsidy. The Boomer-controlled government expanded housing subsidies during the Boomers’ prime home-owning years: property tax caps, mortgage interest deductions, tax exemptions on sales, and so on all favored existing and wealthier homeowners.
Even worse, the one thing that could have made housing affordable to Millennials—the 2008 housing bubble burst—was engineered to bring the market back up:
When bets turned sour, the Fed intervened, to the great benefit of Boomers. The bank purchased mortgage assets to hold the market together, and by 2016, housing had almost entirely recovered the losses from the period 2007–2012, for reasons again mostly untethered from economic fundamentals. The Boomers will soon become liquidators of real estate at these conveniently refreshed prices, harvesting substantial cash from credulous new buyers. Worse, the costs of previous home subsidies will be borne by the young, in the form of national debt passed along due to costs of housing tax subsidies and other goodies handed out by the Boomers to the Boomers.
Trade and immigration didn’t affect Boomers the way they do today’s workers. As Gibney notes, in the short-term, all Americans benefit from low-cost goods available with free trade and immigrants willing to work for less. But in the medium-term, “beneficiaries tend to be those insulated from displacement either by seniority, skill, or money . . . categories inhabited by older persons.”
Taxes, Debt, and Trouble
The Silent Generation had tax rates as high as 94 percent for top-earners in 1945. After World War II, after the war debt was mostly paid down, the highest tax rate remained 70 percent. That is, until tax reform started in 1981 and the top rate plummeted from 70 percent to 50 percent. By 1988, the highest tax bracket was 28 percent. Bush’s tax cuts “were essentially made permanent by President Obama in 2013, with the exception of a modest reversion in top rates, from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, for the wealthiest taxpayers.”
Wealthy Boomers today benefit from numerous tax loopholes and often pay a lower tax rate than their less wealthy children. While Boomers were avoiding taxes, debt was increasing and America was crumbling around them.
Infrastructure
The Silent Generation built America’s infrastructure, once the best in the world. Boomers allowed highways, sewage systems, dams, and public transportation to deteriorate rather than pay higher taxes.
The American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) Report Card gave America’s infrastructure a D- overall in 2013 (and a D+ in 2017), both grades indicating “infrastructure is in poor to fair condition and mostly below standard, with many elements approaching the end of their service life. A large portion of the system exhibits significant deterioration. Condition and capacity are of significant concern with strong risk of failure.”
ASCE estimated in 2013 that it would take $3.6 trillion over five years to bring the grade up to a B (“adequate for now”). Boomer presidents Bush and Obama increased the national debt by many more trillions with little to show for it.
The sociopaths ran down infrastructure to help pay for tax cuts, and, unless they’re stopped, they will run it down further to pay for their retirements.
Boomer Entitlement: Social Security
The Boomers’ biggest fuck-you to future generations has only just begun: Their use of massive amounts of Social Security paid for by the young.
Originally called the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Act, Social Security was conceived in the 1930s and meant to be a net to catch those truly impoverished in old age. At the time, the average life expectancy was just over 65, about the same age the benefits started. People worked until they died and only the rich retired in the sense we mean it today. Gibney says:
The demographic data meant that old age benefits were originally designed for the catastrophe of extreme age, rather than nearly universal assistance to cushion years and then decades of retirement.
Boomers have benefitted from an increased lifespan (now 79 years in the U.S.) but they kept the official retirement age basically the same for themselves. Those born prior to 1937 can retire at 65, those born in 1943–1954 at 66, and those 1960 and later at 67. Reduced benefits can be taken at age 62. From 1970–71 through 2011, the average period of retirement grew from 13.6 years to 18 years. No doubt the retirement age will have to be increased in the future, but it’s looking like the Boomers will make sure it’s after they’ve collected their two decades of benefits.
We’re looking at a situation where Boomers (and often their parents) had luxurious, decades-long retirements, disproportionate to what they put in, paid for by the young who won’t get any such thing. According to the Urban Institute, a medium-income dual-income couple born in 1955 will pay in $728,000 in payroll taxes, but take out $1.15 million in benefits. That’s nearly half-a-million dollars in surplus per Boomer couple. Consider too that higher numbers of Boomer women were stay-at-home-moms than current generations, which entitles them to half of the amount of their husband’s Social Security benefit whether married or divorced. (In the above example, that would be $364,000 paid in by the working partner, and $862,500 paid out total to both spouses). Gibney is correct in calling it a redistributionist policy:
Ideally, redistributionist policies as large as America’s present old-age benefits (OABs) programs should involve some degree of informed consent on the part of those bearing the costs. This has not happened, because Boomer sociopaths do not want to risk an honest dialogue.
Boomers had the money to pay for their own retirements rather than voting for Social Security benefits to be paid by the young (Gibney notes that despite their huge disagreements on policy, both Trump and Hillary Clinton vowed to not cut benefits). Boomers have simply chosen not to care about their descendants. Savings as a percent of disposable income was just under 5 percent from 1996 to 2016, when Boomers were 44–64 years old. From 1950–1985, by comparison, the rate was nearly 10 percent.
If nothing changes, Boomers will spend the next several decades taking large Social Security checks in addition to the wealth they’ve amassed from decades of rising housing prices, a booming stock market, and good interest rates on savings in their youth. The working Gen Xers, Millennials, and up-and-coming Gen Z will be forced to pay for Boomers to have luxurious vacations, dinners out, dream houses, road trips in RVs, and corporatized junk for the grandchildren.
The Boomers had every possible advantage, while contributing considerably less than they could have to a retirement they view as their right. Whether we continue to provide Boomers with benefits depends on whether we believe they deserve them, and this is a far more urgent discussion than the usual parade of distractions offered during election seasons.
I disagree with part of Gibney’s prescription to fix the problems left by the Boomers—for middle-class Gen X and Millennials to suck it up and pay more taxes. A better solution depends on the younger generations uniting against the establishment and demanding that Boomers take some cuts and work part-time in their retirement. Although Boomers control the Republican and Democrat parties and the media, a new coalition seems possible, given the hatred for Boomers that exists among their children and grandchildren.
In fact, Gibney refers to Carl Schmidt and the need for a hated Other, and suggests that Boomers become that Other, noting that despite its abuses, a Schmittian menace can positively motivate society. He adds:
Part of my goal throughout has obviously been to establish Boomers as a highly culpable Other, one whose deposition might lead to some real good. Boomers really are different, as they often and proudly remind. They do not share other generations’ values and do not behave in ways that accord with America’s better conceptions of itself. They are Other, even, in their own ways, enemies of state and society.
If we want Boomers to help fix the destruction they’ve engineered, the time to act is now.
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