The “OK, boomer” meme is unimaginative, milquetoast, and generally misdirected towards Gen Xers born long after 1964, the last year of official boomer births. But clearly, it’s driven boomers — the generation most responsible for sowing the disarray of anti-family social movements, endorsing endless wars, and blowing up the national debt — into a tizzy.
“OK, millennials,” Myrna Blyth, the senior vice president and editorial director of media for AARP, told Axios. “But we’re the people that actually have the money.”
OK, boomer, if that’s actually true, then why the hell do we owe you a generational wealth transfer in the form of Social Security?
Social Security has always been shaped like a Ponzi scheme, but a high and stable enough birth rate, responsible national spending, and personal accountability ought to have kept Social Security as retirement insurance, not the entirety of retirement savings, solvent.
But despite boomers growing up in the economic and cultural boom following World War II, they rejected religion at record rates and traded true love for free love, causing our birth rate to plummet to all-time lows, even as teen and out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed. It was boomers who began the generational cycle of children born to fatherless households.
As boomers were busy destroying the social fabric and the birth rates required to sustain larger government, they were demanding new unfunded liabilities. When President George W. Bush saw the incoming revenue shortfall for Social Security and attempted to ameliorate it with careful, privatizing reforms, this supposedly “conservative” generation rebuffed him.
When the last large set of boomers had children in the mid-90s, there were more than three workers for every Social Security recipient, nearly identical to the ratio from two decades earlier. By 2010, there were fewer than three workers for every recipient, and by 2035, when the program becomes insolvent, there will be only 2.3 workers per recipient.
Furthermore, Social Security’s return on investment is positive for most boomers, but it will be negative for most millennials. If they couldn’t be bothered to bang out the basic math and the subsequent amount of children needed to sustain their big government demands, why do we owe them further Social Security payments? Especially when, as the AARP lady noted, boomers are the wealthiest generation in history?
Boomers inherited the most prosperous nation in human history — one bolstered by a culture of love of country, family, and freedom. They’re leaving us with $23 trillion in national debt and counting, an inescapable cycle of fatherless children, and a collapsing social fabric.
But yes, they have all the money. So I don’t think we millennials owe them one dime.
