Our country is enduring the most entitled, self-centered, short-sighted generation in its history. Luckily they’re about to retire.
I know, I know. An entitled generation, I must be talking about millennials. Rarely has anything been quite so popular as making fun of millennials is now. But a generation has one essential goal: make the world a better place for those who come next. And every American generation has succeeded—except for one.
The baby boomers are the children of “the greatest generation,” but boy have they been a pendulum swing the other direction.
When I was born in 1984, the start of the millennials, we had an accumulated national debt of $1.1 Trillion. By 2009, we had an annual deficit of $1.4 Trillion. Think of that. The baby boomers put our country in more debt in a year, then every prior generation had put the country in combined.
Baby boomers bought trickle down economics in order to squeeze a bit more out of the economy for a few years.
But we paid dearly for their impatience. While the baby boomers were on the clock, from the mid 1980s until 2012, the top .1% of Americans tripled their wealth, while the bottom 90% dropped by a third, even though worker productivity has jumped 400%.
If income were distributed as evenly today, as it was in 1978, the average American would have to work 23 hours a week to make the same amount of money. But instead we spend more time at work and away from our families than ever before.
Between 1978 and 2014 the prison population in the US quadrupled in order to feed the appetite of our corporate prison system.
The baby boomers’ obsession with deregulation through the eighties and nineties led to a historically bad economy just as those millennials were about to hit the job market.
And when the baby boomers decided it was time to go to war, they couldn’t be bothered to pay for it like their parents, instead chalking it up to “deficit spending,” which let's be clear is a euphemism for my kids' money.
Then just as their medical bills started to pile up they pass a bill requiring the still healthy millennials to fund their insurance premiums.
And all this time, the baby boomers have marched toward the ticking time bomb of their own retirement.
Hopefully, they’ve been ignorant that by the time I finish paying for their social security and medicare the program will be bankrupt. But with how long that's been clear, it’s more likely they knew, but just didn’t care.
Yet in one condescending op-ed and LinkedIn article after the next, I’m supposed to believe that millennials are entitled because they support government spending on things with an actual return on investment, like higher education or maternity leave? Are we serious?
Baby boomers used up their parent’s money. When it ran out, they sold their soul to Wall Street for the “Greed is Good” eighties. When that still wasn’t enough for them, they began to spend their kids' money, then their grandchildren’s money. Now they're spending their great grandchildren’s money. And now that the money is running out they kick and stomp their feet because they can’t budge one minute or one dollar on their entitlement packages.
Excuse me if I don’t get all worked up because your unpaid intern requires different management strategies.
We do have a generation problem in this country. And while they may be nearly retired, it’s likely going to take my whole life and probably my children’s before we can fix their mess.