The Boomers Are Evil

Your life is ruined? Blame the Boomers!

Every generation thinks there’s something wrong with the other generation. Ours is the first one that can prove our thesis with a spreadsheet. The thesis? The country is fucked because of Boomers. Alternatively view this as a collection of facts about boomers that they don’t want you to know. When you do, a lot of things which are happening now will become more clear.

Now approximately 73% of all wealth in the U.S. is currently owned by Americans over the age of 55, and 63% of all American wealth is concentrated in the hands of Boomers and the Silent Generation (who are still alive somehow).

The Congress is likewise pretty old, the average age is 59, while the average age of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence was 44. In contrast, the average age of the Israeli Knesset is 50.

Before we get into the numbers, it’s worth naming the hypocrisy upfront. This is the generation that preached personal responsibility, mocked socialism, and built an entire political identity around pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. They were going to be the last people to demand handouts. Instead they became the most successful recipients of government wealth redistribution in American history.

Many people assume that older generations have always held greater financial and political power than younger ones as a natural state of affairs. Under this view, Baby Boomers controlling 63% of the wealth while making up only 27% of the population would simply be the expected outcome of market forces. This explanation, however, does not hold up. The Boomers’ wealth is largely the product of the welfare state policies of the past century.

Before large-scale welfare reforms of the 1960s, the elderly had much higher rates of poverty than the younger generation (boomers). By 1995, the net worth of a 80 year old was equal to the net worth of a 50 year old. In 1984, households 65+ were 10× wealthier than younger counterparts. By 2015 it had increased to 47×.

The mechanism is not complicated. Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you-go systems. The money you pay in goes directly to current retirees. When Boomers were working, there were 5 workers per retiree funding the system.

Russ Greene of the Prime Mover Institute calls this Total Boomer Luxury Communism:

The essence of TBLC is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer. America has achieved the Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Only it looks more like golf in the morning, horseback riding in the afternoon, drinks at the social club in the evening, and a restful night’s sleep in a million-dollar home — all thanks to the largesse of the U.S. government.

Note the irony: America runs six times more wealth redistribution per person than communist China and the primary beneficiary is the generation that voted against redistribution their entire lives. Democrats and Republicans agree on at least 85% of federal spending, mostly because they both support the transfer from young workers to wealthy seniors.

As OpenTheBooks writes:

In 1985, both seniors and younger households spent slightly more than $4,000 per person on the following annual expenses, regardless of age: restaurants, entertainment, hotels, mass transit including airfare, tobacco and alcohol. But seniors’ spending gradually increased, and by 2024, households owned by 65 to 74-year-olds spent $5,301 per person on those “wants.” Younger households spent just $2,613 per person.

The most infuriating thing about all of this is that when Boomers are confronted about it point blank, they openly state that this is their agenda. Ask Americans whether Social Security should be protected by raising taxes on younger workers, or whether young workers should be protected by trimming benefits: among the 65+, it’s 89% to 11% in favor of taxing the young. The bootstraps generation votes, near-unanimously, for other people’s money.

Most people don’t know that Social Security benefits can exceed $117,000, all extracted from younger workers who are blamed as being lazy or whatever.

As if that wasn’t enough, three times more Boomers than Millennials plan to spend everything on themselves. The generation that called everyone else entitled is, empirically, the most materially selfish cohort in the history of survey research.

They called young people irresponsible for struggling in an economy they deliberately structured against them. They complained about government spending while voting for every politician who protected their entitlements. They said they believed in leaving something for their children but then when surveyed at 3:1 odds in favor of spending it all on themselves.

As I wrote on my Telegram, you don’t hate them enough. These people are short-sighted, only care about themselves and their political actions are entirely driven by self-interest.

A useful corrective to the idea that this is simply how economies work: look at countries where it doesn’t work this way.

A more dynamic economy (such as the Baltic states) typically has a more equitable wealth skew towards the young unlike Germany. For instance, the wealthiest group of Lithuanians is in the 35-44 age cohort, while the wealthiest group of Germans is in the 65-74 cohort.

One key difference between the Baltic states and Germany, Spain or France is that the elderly in the Baltic states have subhuman pensions and their governments aren’t particularly eager in funding their luxurious communist lifestyles. Unlike the Western world, the Baltic states never built the same entitlement architecture. Soviet-era housing was distributed through privatization rather than inflated through decades of subsidy. Pensions are flat-rate and modest. Governments did not spend forty years engineering asset price growth for the benefit of existing homeowners.

Besides welfare, the boomers owe their wealth to the increase in the housing prices, which they own and further boost their value by increasing immigration into the West.

As a result, they’re pricing out the younger generation from ever owning homes. Consider the UK where over-60 year-olds own 55% of all property while under-40s own just 10%.

To drive the housing prices as well as to fund their communist welfare, they need people who are willing to work for them. Property values are a function of demand versus supply. Since Boomers stopped having children, the only mechanism left is importation. Boris Johnson explained it openly. His post-COVID immigration surge happened because his government needed to “deal with inflation” after the pandemic — which meant getting in “hands to do the work” to stop wages from rising.

As the Liverpoolecho reports:

Since 2010, the state pension for a Brit has climbed from £423 monthly to £1,048 – an increase of nearly 150%. During the same timeframe, average earnings have grown by just 66%, while 55% inflation has eroded most real-terms gains for working people.

Keith Woods makes the case that Ireland is the prime case study of this : mass immigration into a country building almost no new housing. The population grew by four people for every house constructed. The result: 69.9% of 25-year-olds in Ireland now live with their parents. Ireland’s fertility rate fell from 2.05 in 2010 to roughly 1.7 today. Affordable housing and high birthrates used to go together. But now the Boomers have destroyed it and permanently reoriented towards foreign labor as means of growing their own wealth.

The feedback loop is self-reinforcing: higher immigration → higher housing demand → higher asset prices → wealthier Boomers → more political donations to parties that promise open borders → more immigration. Decreasing native birth-rates will only further fuel this crisis.

To quote Bruce Cannon Gibney from A Generation of Sociopaths (2017):

For the past several decades, the nation has been run by people who present, personally and politically, the full sociopathic pathology: deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility, the works. Those people are the Baby Boomers.

One last thing worth addressing: the widespread assumption that Boomers are politically right-wing. They are not. They vote for the moderate establishment parties — the ones that talk about cutting immigration while doing nothing about it, promise fiscal responsibility while expanding entitlements, and protect house prices while claiming to care about affordability.

Across the West, the nationalist and populist right runs strongest among the young and weakest among the old. The Boomers are not secret allies of any reform movement. They are the core constituency of the regime.

To quote Gibney again:

Someone had to elect these tornadoes of vice and it was, of course, Boomers who were content, often enthusiastic, to vote for people who looked like them and showered them with improvident goodies.

What makes this generation historically distinct is the combination of scale, political power, and a complete absence of concern for what comes after. Only 22% plan to leave an inheritance. Among Boomer millionaires, just 21% say they want the next generation to enjoy their wealth. The future is not their problem and they say this openly.

When boomers have contributed to a lower fertility rate, they turned towards migrants to fund their luxurious welfare state, ruining the future demographics of the country in the process of satisfying their selfish demands.

A generation that genuinely cared about its civilization would have had more children, paid more into the systems younger generations would inherit, accepted some personal sacrifice so that the country they received would still exist in recognizable form when they left it. Instead they extracted everything, replaced what they consumed with imported substitutes, and made the political system to serve them.

As they say “weak men create hard times”.