The Boomer Mirage:

How One Generation’s Selfishness Doomed the Next!

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my 31-year-old son, who attended the prestigious London School of Economics, unloaded a verdict that stunned even this jaded Gen Xer. To Millennials and Gen Z, Baby Boomers are not heroes who surfed a postwar boom. They are the most selfish, self-serving generation in American history. What follows is his case, backed by cold numbers.

The Greatest Heist in History: Wealth Hoarding on Steroids

In the third quarter of 2024, Americans born between 1946 and 1964 (“Boomers”), roughly 20 percent of the population, controlled 51.6 percent of the nation’s $160 trillion in household wealth. Millennials, a larger cohort, held barely 10 percent. The Silent Generation, at the same age Boomers are now, controlled only 23 percent of wealth. This is not organic success. It is extraction.

Boomers bought homes when the median price was three times the median income. Today the ratio tops seven. They now own 28 percent of homes with three or more bedrooms while often living alone or as couples. First-time buyers are no longer 29-year-olds. The average is 40. Gen Z reports delaying marriage and children primarily because they cannot afford shelter. Fully 84 percent cite housing costs as the reason.

Debt Serfdom: The Gift That Keeps Taking

Total student debt stands at $1.77 trillion and burdens 42.5 million borrowers, almost all Millennials and Gen Z, with an average balance of $39,000. Boomers attended state universities for a few hundred dollars a semester or left with tiny loans they repaid in two years. They then systematically defunded public higher education and deregulated private lending, turning college from a public good into a profit center.

Meanwhile, they cut their own taxes fourteen times since 1980 and exploded the national debt from $900 billion to now exceeding $38 trillion. Interest payments alone now exceed the entire defense budget, a bill their grandchildren will pay.

The Social Security Cash Grab

Social Security was sold to the public as a safety net for the retired poor. Boomers turned it into a middle-class and upper-middle-class entitlement. In 1983, they raised the payroll tax but also locked in generous benefits indexed to wages, not prices, and allowed early claiming at 62 with only modest reductions. Today the average retired Boomer couple collects over $40,000 a year tax-free or lightly taxed, even if their household assets exceed $2 million, rather than ensuring it is there for those who need it.

There has never been a real trust fund, only IOUs in a filing cabinet. It has always been a direct transfer: today’s workers pay today’s retirees. When Boomers entered the workforce, the payroll tax rate was 5.4 percent total and there were five workers per retiree. Today the combined rate is 12.4 percent with only 2.7 workers per beneficiary, and that ratio falls to 2.1 by 2035. Boomers paid the low rates their entire careers yet will collect every promised dollar at full value. The Congressional Budget Office projects by 2034 the program will be forced into automatic 21 percent benefit cuts unless payroll taxes rise again or benefits are slashed, cuts that will fall almost entirely on younger generations already drowning in other Boomer bills.

The Paper-Tiger Economy

Cheap oil, offshoring, financial deregulation, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) zoning created the illusion of endless growth. Decades of under building housing due to NIMBY driven regulation (to ensure their property values skyrocketed of course) and starving infrastructure spending left the supply side parched. When the music stopped in 2021, inflation hit 9.1 percent, the highest in four decades, precisely because the economy had been rigged to protect Boomer asset values at the expense of everything else. The young now pay the price in stagnant wages, sky-high rents, and a shrinking middle class.

The Verdict

Economist Bruce Gibney called it in his 2017 book A Generation of Sociopaths: Boomers engaged in “generational plunder,” maximizing short-term consumption while minimizing investment in the future. The $84 trillion wealth transfer now underway is the final act. Money is moving from the old to the old, not to the society that will need it most.

The Boomer legacy is not Woodstock and moon landings. It is gated communities, locked-up housing stock, gutted universities, a raided Social Security system, and crushed dreams for our future generations.

Release the homes. Tax the estates. Means-test the entitlements. And accept the judgment already rendered by your children and grandchildren: you were handed the greatest economy in history and chose to eat the seed corn.  It is no wonder the children of today are more angry than ever and have so little hope in the future of America.  You owe it to them to right the ship you ran ashore.

While not ALL Boomers are guilty of this behavior, and there are many who defy the odds, we cannot ignore the facts.  We need to recognize that the pure unadulterated selfishness of one generation has stacked the deck against the next several.  And actions have consequences!

History will not be kind and It shouldn’t be.

Michael J Badagliacco, "MJB"

Michael is a father of five, grandfather of three, USAF Veteran, International Recording Artist, and the Editor-In-Chief of the Colorado DOGE Report.  He is passionate about the USA and the founders' genius in crafting the Constitution.