What Will Be The Baby Boomers’ Legacy?

In a recent National Review article, author Michael Brendan Dougherty lamented the failure of the “Baby Boomers” to pass on the “American Dream” to future generations. How much the Boomers were at fault depends on one’s interpretation of major events of the last 50 years or so, America’s response, and how much one believes the Boomers influenced that response.

As a Boomer, the one embarrassingly causal factor I can point to about our generation’s failures is a tendency toward selfishness. The 1970s were not called the “me generation decade” for nothing. And it was not for nothing that Ronald Reagan so astutely noted that our freedoms were always only a generation away from extinction, unless the new generations were informed enough to understand how precious freedom is and the sacrifices involved in keeping it. 

Somewhere along the way, many Boomers lost the plot with their selfish and irresponsible behavior, which, in turn, was passed on to future generations. We also failed to take the left’s invasion of academia seriously enough, from kindergarten through college, and some Boomers were active participants in the invasion. As college administrators and professors became increasingly liberal, they expanded their administrative functions and research initiatives (including the need to “publish or perish”), causing annual tuitions to skyrocket well above the inflation rate. When I tell my college-age grandchildren that I paid about $13.00 per credit hour when I started at a Big Ten university in the early 1970s, they cannot believe it.

The most salient point of Dougherty’s article, in my opinion, is his claim that President Trump and other Republicans are not taking the “affordability” issue seriously enough. One of the most plausible explanations I’ve heard about Marxist Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City is that the young people who voted for him overwhelmingly believe that the system in place is broken beyond repair, and affordability (or lack of) plays a big role in that. Looking back, I was not a homeowner until age 30, and then only because a nice house in a safe community was available for less than $60,000. I can only imagine how a young person, fresh out of college and struggling to find a job that relates to their degree, copes with housing prices that are largely out of reach except for established and well-off people. I don’t think that Trump’s offer of a 50-year mortgage resonates with that person. The question is, how did we get to the point where the cost of living prices so many people out of the market?

Even as a middle-schooler back in the late 1960s, I was hearing arguments about President Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” budgets to fund the war effort in Vietnam while, at the same time, providing the expanded welfare benefits of his “Great Society” programs. The old lessons expressed by “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” or “You can’t have it both ways” were ignored, and the budget set sail toward ever-increasing deficit spending, which fueled inflation. Then the Middle East oil crisis hit as Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed shipments to the U.S. in retaliation for our support of Israel. As a result, gas prices went up drastically in the 1970s, never again to descend to original “normals” of less than 40 cents per gallon. It cannot be overstated how this permanent increase in gasoline prices affected so many aspects of living costs, as increased shipping costs had an across-the-board impact on the cost of groceries, construction materials, and almost everything.

The actions of President Bill Clinton and the Republicans in Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, gave promise in the late 1990s that we were finally getting serious about tackling perennial budget deficits and an expanding national debt. However, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, forever changed the landscape. We went from Bill Clinton’s statement that “the era of big government is over,” to a drastic expansion which created the new Department of Homeland Security while ramping up our military to fight a “global war on terror.” Barack Obama then diluted many of the welfare reforms that were, until his presidency, reducing dependency on welfare and the related costs. All of these actions dramatically expanded annual deficit spending and the national debt, which in turn, fueled more inflation. Only by keeping interest rates artificially low during the Obama years did we avoid a big problem getting even worse – until the COVID-19 crisis and the Biden years made it so.

At the same time, we Boomers apparently left the impression on our offspring, however unwittingly, that they could step into the same standard of living we had as they were graduating from college. In other words, they were expecting a beginning salary equal to what it took us 20 years or more to attain. This mentality, which has been passed on to many of the current Gen Zers, also fuels support amongst the young for Mamdani, since he’s promising them so much free stuff along with rent controls. Don’t think for a moment that this attitude and its influence on voting are limited to the boroughs of New York City, either.

As the Boomers’ influence recedes due to deaths and retirements, it will be interesting to see the impact that has on the sense of entitlement and instant gratification so prevalent in our populace these days. Hopefully, in the long arc of history, our generation will be remembered for better things than that, as our youthful rebellions set up a hunger for truth from our governmental leaders, and that is needed now more than ever.