Newenglanddeac
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I don't agree with everything in this article but I think it's thought provoking and makes some valid points. Look forward to reading BKF's 90 page retort.
"What happened in the White House happened everywhere else. By 1994, boomers held a majority of House seats, a proportion that peaked at 79 percent in 2008 and remains a still formidable 69 percent. The rest of government went the same way: Boomers make up 86 percent of governors, about three-quarters of the proposed Cabinet, and much of the judiciary and bureaucracy. Except for youthful Silicon Valley, the private sector also fell into boomer hands decades ago and remains there."
UNFORTUNATELY, BOOMERS show no appetite for maintaining the assets their parents accumulated. Public higher education, nearly free for boomers, has become dauntingly expensive. Infrastructure is neither built nor maintained, and not even “responsible” boomers take this seriously. It was then-candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton, those paragons of boomer probity, who proposed a gas-tax holiday in 2008, the year the Highway Trust Fund went bust. Federal research and development funding also suffered, with dispiriting consequences for the future. Smartphones may be fairly recent, but their core technologies were developed with government money long ago. Enjoy your iPhone now, because your iCopter and iKidney will be indefinitely delayed.
The consequences of boomer overconsumption, underinvestment, and appetite for risk reveal themselves every time a bridge or bank collapses, but can be summarized in America’s prolonged economic mediocrity. Finding decent growth requires stretching all the way back to the 1990s, and even so, the 1990s barely edged out 1970s’ squalor on a per capita GDP basis. Thanks to boomer policies, the new normal is 1.6 percent real growth, well below the 2.5 to 3.5 percent rates prevailing from the 1950s to the 1980s. For the young, the price will be incomes 30 percent to 50 percent lower than they could have been.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2...-everything/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html
"What happened in the White House happened everywhere else. By 1994, boomers held a majority of House seats, a proportion that peaked at 79 percent in 2008 and remains a still formidable 69 percent. The rest of government went the same way: Boomers make up 86 percent of governors, about three-quarters of the proposed Cabinet, and much of the judiciary and bureaucracy. Except for youthful Silicon Valley, the private sector also fell into boomer hands decades ago and remains there."
UNFORTUNATELY, BOOMERS show no appetite for maintaining the assets their parents accumulated. Public higher education, nearly free for boomers, has become dauntingly expensive. Infrastructure is neither built nor maintained, and not even “responsible” boomers take this seriously. It was then-candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton, those paragons of boomer probity, who proposed a gas-tax holiday in 2008, the year the Highway Trust Fund went bust. Federal research and development funding also suffered, with dispiriting consequences for the future. Smartphones may be fairly recent, but their core technologies were developed with government money long ago. Enjoy your iPhone now, because your iCopter and iKidney will be indefinitely delayed.
The consequences of boomer overconsumption, underinvestment, and appetite for risk reveal themselves every time a bridge or bank collapses, but can be summarized in America’s prolonged economic mediocrity. Finding decent growth requires stretching all the way back to the 1990s, and even so, the 1990s barely edged out 1970s’ squalor on a per capita GDP basis. Thanks to boomer policies, the new normal is 1.6 percent real growth, well below the 2.5 to 3.5 percent rates prevailing from the 1950s to the 1980s. For the young, the price will be incomes 30 percent to 50 percent lower than they could have been.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2...-everything/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html
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