Tag: Baby Boomers

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

There’s never been a generation as influential, for good or ill, as today’s Baby Boomers.

So our mass retirement over the next decade should, in theory, be a big deal.

One scenario has us selling our stocks and either spending the proceeds or moving them into less risky assets like bonds and cash. This reverses the past few decades’ upward pressure on stock prices and sends them down hard. At the same time, we downsize our living arrangements, swapping multi-story McMansions for smaller one-story homes conducive to aging in place. Large house prices, as a result, plunge.

Harry Dent is a well-known proponent of the demographics-as-destiny idea. Here’s his take:

Continue reading “Retiring Boomers Are Deflationary, Right?”

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man

The baby-boomer generation were perhaps the most privileged generation that the US has ever spawned.

Their fathers returned from World War II, eager to get married, buy a house and start a family. The economy was booming, as, during the early years of the war, the US wisely stayed out, but provided tanks, helmets and even toothbrushes to those who were directly involved in the fray.

What’s more, they didn’t accept pound notes or francs; they accepted only gold. So, at the end of the war, when the manufacturing cities of Europe had been destroyed by bombs, the male populations decimated and the governments broke, the US was on a roll. They had most of the world’s gold and had first-rate manufacturing facilities that only had to switch from making jeeps and rifles to making cars and televisions.

That wave of wealth allowed the young married couples to spoil their children with whatever they wanted.

Continue reading “Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll”

Guest Post by The Zman

The 2020 presidential election, which will probably be Trump versus Warren, is shaping up to be the final act of Baby Boomer America. Both are of the generation that has come to symbolize the culture of those born after the Second World War. Trump was born in 1946, while Warren was born in 1949. That means both came of age with the Beatles and the Stones. Both were in college when the hippies and anti-war protesters were taking over the college campus. They are children of the 1960’s.

Continue reading “The Last Hurrah”

Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer

Guest Post by Lyman Stone

The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

Continue reading “The Boomers Ruined Everything”

Via Raul Ilargi Meijer’s Automatic Earth blog,

There are days, though all too scarce, when very nice surprises come my way. Case in point: yesterday I received a mail from David Holmgren after a long period of radio silence. Australia’s David is one of the fathers of permaculture, along with Bill Mollison, for those few who don’t know him. They first started writing about the concept in the 1970s and never stopped.

Dave calls himself “permaculture co-originator” these days. Hmm. Someone says: “one of the pioneers of modern ecological thinking”. That’s better. No doubt there. These guys taught many many thousands of people how to be self-sufficient. Permaculture is a simple but intricate approach to making sure that the life in your garden or backyard, and thereby your own life, moves towards balance.

My face to face history with David is limited, we spent some time together on two occasions only, I think, in 2012 a day at his home (farm) in Australia and in 2015 -a week- in Penguin, Tasmania at a permaculture conference where the Automatic Earth’s Nicole Foss was one of the key speakers along with Dave. Still, despite the limited time together I see him as a good and dear friend, simply because he’s such a kind and gracious and wise man.

In his mail, David asked if I would publish this article, which he originally posted on his own site just yesterday under the name “The Apology: From Baby Boomers To The Handicapped Generations”. I went for a shorter title (it’s just our format), but of course I will.

Continue reading “David Holmgren: A Baby Boomers’ Apology”

Guest Post by The Zman

During World War II, there was a great debate among the Allies about the use of bombing raids against German cities. Collateral damage was the concern. The Germans built their munitions plants near population centers. There were those in the high command who said that if the Allies used aerial bombardment against these facilities, then they would be no better than the Germans. It would be much better to maintain their principles and lose than win and be judged as morally equal or even similar as the Germans.

Continue reading “Boomer Cons”

“And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.”

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.”

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children–to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation.”

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it’s not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they’ve chosen to demonize. It’s all about class, not age. It’s 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.”

Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown