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Baby Boomers blamed for bailout and beyond
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There is always a clash between generations.
"My Generation," the Who song from 1965, focused attention on the Baby Boomers' need to separate themselves from their parents and grandparents. (And by the way, we didn't really mean it when we sang, "I hope I die before I get old." In fact, we really want to live forever.)
"Don't trust anyone over 30," the Boomers said, even as they started to turn 30 themselves. It was a message that the old ways were bad, the new ways as represented by the Boomers were better.
But the tables are turning.
Millennials look ahead to their economic and social inheritance from Baby Boomers, and they don't like what they're getting. More and more, the chatter is that Baby Boomers created a mess far worse than the mess that was created for them.
Said one comment in a Los Angeles Times blog:
"Let's see the boomer scorecard:
1987 market crash? Yup.
1992 S&L crisis? Yup.
2000 Dot Com bubble? Yup.
2008 complete financial meltdown? Yup.
I'm not sure how the boomers will top this most recent feat. I'm guessing the complete and utter bankrupting of the United States government through the collapse of the Social Security system. Really, that's all they have left to ruin."
A t-shirt that's being sold online is meant to mock the economic mess of the $700 billion economic bailout bill that passed Congress this week. It asks, "Got $700 billion?" It's a question being asked of Baby Boomers.
The noise of blame has various levels of intensity.
There is this diatribe from a self-described post-modern neo-femnist: "... if you are a Boomer operative word is entitlement---and you will get all those things which you so richly deserve---even if it is necessary to mortgage the country and your children's future."
And there is the more subtle but pointed criticism of Peggy Noonan, former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan and a Boomer herself, born in 1950.
Writing Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, she noted how the White House and Congressional leadership were all lined up to pass the original bailout bill last week. "And then the phones began to ring, from one end of Capitol Hill to the other," she wrote. "And the message in those calls was, essentially: We don't trust you to fix the problem. We suspect you may be the problem, we suspect you may have caused it. Go away."
The more things change, the more they stay the same: It's still as if the grown-ups can't be trusted.
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