If only they had voted for the candidates who wanted a strong social safety net, rather than the ones that wanted to fuck everyone who isn’t part of the 0.1%, maybe they wouldn’t have to worry now…
bernie was who we needed - instead we got trump ala hillary
Thinking voting could save a country like America is so out of touch it’s cringe. America needs revolution.
Who’s gonna lead it? You?
All these armchair revolutionaries.
The same people who are going to “vote”, could.
👆
Look.
We all know boomers individually and like them.
Yes, we should be focusing more on class warfare than generational warfare.
But the bottom line is, as a generation, they were/are AWFUL. Quite possibly the most greedy generation of humans to ever exist. Because they had so much more than any other generation I can think of but are so unwilling to share, even on their way out. And their entire lifetime of voting habits proves how greedy they are.
Their generation has been in control for quite some time now and they are leaving us major environmental problems, an economic shitstorm, and completely off the rails politics.
They failed.
I love my mom, but she has a 4 bedroom house, and owns it outright. She lives by herself in this giant home, a mere 2 blocks away from my house that I’m renting with my wife and her 2 grandkids. We’re couped up in a 2 bedroom 1 bath, 1000 sq ft rental. She was always the one pushing me out of her house instead of offering for me to stay there and save for a down payment. I’ve been renting for over a decade now. The area I live in has just gotten more and more expensive over time. It was always HCOL, but it went from like median 1 million dollar homes to 1.8. I had a small window in COVID where I even had a shot at affording a home due to depressed interest rates and a very brief small drop in local prices. During that time we got outbid when we did try. Since then, prices are up, and rates are up as well. Frankly I don’t give a fuck about buying a home anymore. I will inevitably inherit her home and money, and that’s likely 1-2 decades away, so at this point, why bother struggling? I will say that when I do inherit her home, I intend to share it with my children for as long as they want to because I’m not a selfish asshole. I love my mom, and she’s even semi left leaning for a boomer, so politically she’s tolerable, but listening to anything her or her friends bitch about is so goddamn annoying. Nearly all her friends have almost no living expenses, but hearing them go on about how it was just as hard when she was my age is just insulting. I can back up all my claims with hard data, and they don’t give a fuck because they don’t understand that shit has changed. They all think we’re lazy. They don’t understand childcare, medical insurance, and housing have gone up astronomically while wages have been stagnant. They don’t fucking get it and I hate discussing economics with any of them. I love my Mom to a point, but she’s also incredibly selfish. I will not miss that about her, and I think the world will be better off without a generation of like minded people, and we may actually begin to solve some of our problems. Having said that, it’s also entirely possible that our generation gets all this wealth and just become carbon copies of our greedy ass parents. I hope not.
Not to take away from your post, it just got me thinking about something.
This type of selfishness probably comes from the decades upon decades of both obvious and subtle messaging around scarcity of pretty much everything. Just the advertising phrase “ACT NOW! before it’s gone.” was and is used all the time. We have been conditioned to believe that everything is limited and at the same time we need to have everything. So when your entire life you’ve been inundated with messages of not-enough I can see why there is a fear of losing it all.
I think you’re right that this got cranked to 11 during their lives, but the leaded gasoline might have something to do with this too. Through that lens, much boomer behaviour can be described. Particularly considering that boomer stereotypes are transnational
Meanwhile everyone else outlives their money every couple weeks.
This is the top comment!
Weird I thought it was the billionaires hoarding wealth. I guess we shouldnt be mad at the billionaires anymore but at older Americans who have homes.
Yeah they are the bad guys !
And how dare they stay alive. I mean. The audacity !
I can be mad at both simultaneously.
Billionaires for being leeches and boomers, in general, for voting like assholes and helping those billionaires.
Elder millennial here. My boomer and silent generation parents died and left me nothing ( I had to take care of my mom for ten years)as a result of 2008. They were lifelong liberals as were their parents. The pedophile capitalist class will get that money. All generations of people have been voting for these fascist neoliberals for decades. After Regan both parties started gleefully destroying the middle class, It will all be funneled to the top one way or another. Larry fink has openly stated that the blackrock vultures plan to take savings and 401k money
Joke’s on them, I don’t have those
Yeah but if your parents do it will effect you
This is a dumb article. It sounds like they are blaming boomers for having money, then the article basically explains why they have money, and for the most part it’s justified.
I’m not going to lambast anyone that got a cheap house at a low interest rate, then worked for 50+ years to get to retirement to find out they need more money. It’s not like all of these boomers are sitting on millions, they have hundreds of thousands in retirement, no mortgage, but have fears of medical bills or nursing homes.
Fuck, I hope someday I approach retirement with enough money to live out the rest of my life in relative comfort. I’m fortunate in that I’m in my mid thirties and have a house (mortgage for now, but at least I’m getting equity). That shouldn’t be held against me like it is to boomers in this article.
What I won’t defend is boomers that complain about not having enough money when they continually voted for all of this. Statistically, boomers lean right, but I try not to generalize entire demographics like this. There were a couple of quotes I. His article that highlighted some of the worst offenders out there, but I mostly read about people that know that one illness will wipe out their savings, so they keep working until they can’t.
If I can amass the monies I need to retire early, I’m out ASAP. My company offers a 55/10 plan where if I retire at 55, I can keep my medical coverage until I’m 65 when Medicare kicks in. That’s my current goal, but shit happens, and it can happen to any of us. I just wish that shit happened to the billionaires and not everyone else.
I’m early GenX, very close to boomerhood. I was not able to buy a home until I was 43. I wasn’t wasteful either: bought used cars, cooked my own food, my rent was low for the (HCOL) area, but prices just kept climbing and perpetually stayed just out of reach. Finally got an inexpensive house in a less expensive part.of the Bay Area, and happened to do so when interest rates were low. I have a pile of retirement money waiting for me but I also know it’s not going to last long enough for my likely lifespan (my family tends to die in their 90s.) We can blame boomers for some stuff, but the economy they had in their working years is very different from what we have to deal with now.
I’m not going to lambast anyone that got a cheap house at a low interest rate, then worked for 50+ years to get to retirement to find out they need more money.
What if you found out they also voted like dogshit for 50+ years, leading to the situation we, and they, find ourselves in?
It’s not like all of these boomers are sitting on millions
No, but most of them voted like dogshit anyway.
I hope someday I approach retirement with enough money to live out the rest of my life in relative comfort.
I hope you do too. But only if you voted to help others along the way.
We all know boomers that aren’t wealthy, but still voted like assholes anyway. My father is one of them. They’re in the same shit we are, but voted to hurt others, and themselves, anyway. Pretty goddamn stupid.
I addressed that as well. I don’t have sympathy for people that shoot themselves in the foot, and actively detest them for their actions affecting everyone. My main point is not all boomers are Republicans, and those that aren’t shouldn’t be vilified for living and saving for retirement.
It’s the billionaires! Do not be distracted by articles like this.
I mean the billionaires are largely able to do what they do because Boomers spent decades voting against the interests of everyone that isn’t a billionaire.
Blame can be placed on more than one thing at a time. And should be.
Billionaires wouldn’t be where they are without the help of Boomer voting behaviors for the past 40+ years.
Came into the comments expecting people would pile on boomers, as per usual. Was pleasantly surprised to find that most people are getting the message that it’s a class war.
The idea that boomers are “hoarding America’s wealth and power” is ludicrous.
I’m GenX, and I’m trying to pay off my house, so my son will have the option of being a homeowner when I die. I think it might be the only chance he’ll have.
Hold on a minute billionaires are to blame but boomers aren’t helping by bootlicking them. And yes hoarding what they have too. Some refuse to retire, and some like my dad got millions and doesn’t want to let anyone of his children get red cent.
It’s both.
Billionaries AND boomers are to blame. Just because many boomers aren’t reaping the benefits of their dogshit voting habits doesn’t mean they didn’t have a hand in the current situation because of their voting habits.
At the same time those boomers, through their own ignorance mind you, were sold a bridge that didn’t exist.
Democracy in a capitalist economy is an illusion. Boomers didn’t vote for this, it was foisted on them. Neither party fulfills the promises they make on the campaign trail, unless the promise is to an oligarch.
Boomers didn’t vote for this
As someone who phone banks regularly: They absolutely did. I spoke to hundreds of registered Democratic Boomers. They hated Sanders.
Sure they voted, but they didn’t vote for this. Remember, boomers are the most propagandized generation in the most propagandized country on Earth. Ignorance shouldn’t be an excuse, but most boomers genuinely do not know when they vote against their own interests. They are pawns, while the Kings and Queens laugh to see them blamed. And that pisses me off a lot more than ignorance.
Sure they voted, but they didn’t vote for this.
Yes. They. Did.
Why are houses more unaffordable for your son than they were for you? It’s totally not hording, just boomers being unwilling to build a better world for their children and grandchildren.
You’re a semi boomer though with the last real chance of boomer life style. Not sure I trust you 😉
As an X’er not too far behind them:
On paper I look like one of those hoarders: nice income and a lot of house equity. I also have above average 401k balance
However
- excessive home inflation
- interest rates lock-in
- medical emergency costs ridiculous
- kid college costs ridiculous
- car costs ridiculous
- divorce lost half of everything
- retirement age 65–>67
- ageism means i can’t expect to work as long as I need to
- boomer parents not going to leave anything
We’re hit by all the same excessive inflation as everyone else but we can’t downsize because mortgage rates are too high. All the missing safety nets affect us as much as everyone, except we’re out of time to recover from any catastrophe.
Given a family medical emergency, I missed 15 years of 401k contributions, and never upgraded from A “starter home”, despite what the valuation looks like, and I have a lot of major maintenance coming up
I have to say that despite a lot of things that look really good on paper, I was much better off financially in my 30’s
” You write like every boomer is sitting on a McMansion and a seven‑figure IRA,” one bereaved Boomer wrote to me. “A lot of us are one bad diagnosis away from losing everything.”
Spoken like a generation of morons that voted time and time and time again, most recently in this past election, for economic policies that catered to that eight-figure IRAs because you thought you’d be in that bracket while spending like a drunken sailor for boats and jet skis in a pathetic attempt to seem like you had eight-figure IRAs, all while killing off Unions that tried to protect your pensions and retirement benefits. And let’s not forget that the boomer generation also thought that racism was something that should be brought back.
Nah, this economic hellscape was brought mostly by these old dumbasses, may they reap what they sowed and hopefully quickly so the younger generations can fix what they broke.
I think the silent generation is getting an undeserved pass on this. They are the ones born just before and during WWII, you know the generation of the current President and the one before him. Those MF are still kicking - most of America’s top leadership comes form that generation.
They’re getting a pass because population-wise they had about as much voting power as GenX.
Maybe, but they control more power in the US than GenX has ever had
Even with all the non-ultra rich (500 mil and up) boomers combined, the ultra rich have way more money and are not paying thier fair share. Kill the ultra rich, save the poor.
More than that, the “wealth” Boomers possess is largely tied up in their homes (inflated assets benefiting from artificially low property taxes) and their 401ks (just riding the wave of inflated equities post-COVID). It’s not like they’re stealing your salaries or your health care benefits or larding you up with college debt, as all of these are functions of corporate finance profiteering not personal retirement accounts.
What we’re really seeing is an inflationary wave created by corporate excess consumption that Boomers are able to ride a little easier than their Millennial and GenA peers.
Kill the ultra rich, save the poor.
We have such enormous surpluses, but we insist on squandering them to… build another data center nobody wants? Finance another round of bombing runs on Tehran and Caracas? Shove a few thousand more migrants into concentration camps?
That said, we’ve got a lot of Boomers with brainworms who are convinced this is good public policy. We’ve also got a bunch of Joe Rogan Millennials and Alphas who feel the same way. I don’t know how to change that. Certainly not while billionaires own and operate the national media.
artificially low property taxes
I disagree with this one…
California laws freeze property taxes for residents over the age of 55. The end result is that new homebuyers can pay multiples of what their senior neighbors cough up, because the housing value has been locked in to the pre-'00s price booms. They’re not the only state with these very elderly-friendly property tax rules.
Ok, I didn’t have that law, but my main problem with that law is that it is limited to people over 55.
Problem is property tax valuation ends up mixing up people just using their house as a place to live, and folks using it as a financial instrument. So people can get hosed on the property tax despite having no actionable wealth derived from their residence.
Problem is property tax valuation ends up mixing up people just using their house as a place to live, and folks using it as a financial instrument.
Most tax districts have a “homestead exemption” which is limited to one home per homeowner. You can game this (spouses and children having property declared in their names, for instance). But - broadly speaking - the law does accommodate this exception.
The bigger problem is that our financial sector is so bloated with unspent cash and so hungry for ROI that our tax system isn’t a serious deterrent to landlordism and financialization of real estate.
No disagreement here.
That’s the world they created. They always took the shortest path to profits, and that path was the one that exploited people the most by giving corporations all the power in the name of making the line go up.
Billionaires are collecting everything. Stop stoking the distaste for boomers into the scapegoat they need to take the focus off the capital class. Grandpa with a couple million in assets, mostly in his home, isn’t “hording”, he’s securing himself into his end of life. Elon Musk has no such excuse, he just wants to gratify his unrestrained desire to go to Mars even if it means leaving earth on life support to do it.
I’m no boomer, but I know how they feel. Who can tell when the next crash will hit, and mega inflation will strike. There is just no real way to know you have enough saved. Unless you are like elon or such. And gieven all that. People are holding on to their money because they may have to help keep their kids afloat. It isn’t the boomers making the problem, it’s the mega rich scraping every dime they can put of the hands of everyone they can so that they can be secure in their wealth. The bokmers are just a biproduct of that brainwashing.
It isn’t the boomers making the problem
They voted like shit for decades. That voting created the environment we are now dealing with.
It’s the ultra-wealthy AND boomer’s fault.
They were brainwashed starting at a very young age. I doubt most of us here could have seen through it back then.
Hence how the Americans have a 80 year old president and Mitch Mconnel still has a job.
