A recent article about generational wealth stated that “reasons listed in the report for higher boomer net worth include how this generation was in the ‘right place at the right time.’ By definition, boomers were born after World War II, allowing them to enjoy the economic boom post-war: falling tax rates during their lifetimes, generally healthy stock market with rising values, relatively affordable housing prices, and since the 1980s, falling loan interest rates. In contrast to pre-boomer generations, boomers have benefited from 401(k) retirement plans and associated tax breaks.” When I read crap like this, I wonder what world the author is living in. Boomers lived through at least 5 recessions, including a “Great” one that bankrupted somewhere between 6 million to 10 million households who lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more who emptied their savings and sold their possessions to avoid bankruptcy.
That so called “World War II boom” lasted until most of my generation were about to enter the job market in the 1960s. First, the Vietnam War draft removed 2.2 Americans from beginning of their work lives to pump up the wealth of that group of Robber Barons who would go on to rape and pillage our economy for the next 80 years. There is are several reasons that the often quoted “average (mean) net worth” of Boomers is over $1.5 million while the real average (median) is somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000. Not enough for a secure retirement, by a long shot. There are 11 million 65+ Americans working past their retirement age, 20% of that age group, and many are living paycheck to paycheck.
Nixon started the shift, especially by encouraging health insurance companies to become for-profit institutions with the s Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973. That set the stage for an annual half-million Americans going bankrupt due to medical bills. 41% of working-age Americans—72 million people—are paying off medical debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. 7 million 65+ adults are also in the same sinking boat.
Most of that huge income inequality gap is due to tax policies enacted during the Reagan years that transferred nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% by 2025 and has all but eliminated the US middle class in the process. Reagan and his goons launched a propaganda parade against the “unearned income tax” rates and that set us up for the hedge funds, vulture capitalists, and the billionaire class that the USA is probably permanently cursed with today. Every tax cut since has widened the gap, increased economic inequality, decreased working class security, and lowered the quality of life in this country.
In 2011, my grandson and I took a motorcycle tour of the Black Hills, the Utah and Colorado Rocky Mountain range, and the spaces between Minnesota and those destinations. We camped almost every night in state and federal campgrounds. Every single campground was hosted by people from my generation and all of them had lost everything except the trailer they were living in and the vehicle that pulled it from campground to campground. Several of them admitted that they didn’t really own the camper or the vehicle, either. They were on the move to avoid the repo man, since they couldn’t afford the payments on the remains of their life before the Crash.
There is no generation alive today who had it easy. But there are generations of the inherited rich who have passed on entitlement, wealth, power, education, and opportunity to their offspring. Thomas Jefferson wrote, ““… there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” While Jefferson didn’t live up to many of his own ideals, he proposed a “law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature,” Reagan’s goons convinced voters that an inheritance tax was a “death tax,” which is ridiculous but was effective. Trump’s goons are trying to eliminate public education and to dumb-down the nation to prevent an outbreak of democracy, justice for everyone, and the kind of giant leap in technology, culture, cooperation, world peace, and stability that might allow humanity to solve the real problems, like global warming, that will end our species if allowed to go unchallenged. Pitting generations against each other is key to preventing anything good from rising from the ashes of our current decline.
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