Ervin Burrell said:
zephyr88 said:
Misdirected... the boomers didn't do anything other than take the draws they were promised.
The folks who failed you (and the rest of us) are the elected ass-hats in Washington.
Which generation is most responsible for electing said asshats?
Moving the needle away from established entitlements is very difficult. It's takes a level of radical devotion that change and growth in numbers that conservatives have never been able to sustain and libertarians have never seen fit to set aside their ideological purity to help create more incremental victories than we've had the last 50 years.
Social Security, Medicare, and all 1960s War on Poverty programs were voted into existence by politicians voted into office by the Lost Generation in response to the Great Depression(SS&Medicare) and the aging Lost Generation and their Greatest Generation children voted for the war on poverty programs of the 1960. None of these programs were voted into existence by the Boomers. The oldest boomers didn't reach voting age until right until he middle of LBJ war on poverty.
It was the Boomer Generation that had a high percentage of its cohort break ranks from their Democrat FDR loving parents during the rise of the Reagan Revolution against the establishment blue blood GOP in the 1970s and 1980s. The same generations that pushed the GOP into the majority in the house in 1994, which brought about accountability against the excesses of Clinton and the democrats and created while modest by my preferences, still real roll backs in poverty fighting programs and the size of government.
A very large contingent of the Boomer generation, those that bucked the system to create the Reagan Revolution, that had grown disenchanted with some of the compromises of the Reagan administrations including Bush 41, again went in a different direction in 1992 and 1996 to vote for an outsider billionaire candidate talking about the American worker and creating an economy and government for American workers and not migrants. A candidate that talked about the excesses of both parties and the size of government. He created a third party called the Reform Party and its brief rise in popularity sent shock waves across the GOP especially. Perot and the Reform Parry did better than any third party since Teddies Bull Moose Party because of Boomer support.
That Boomer support would be behind the rise of the Tea Party. Again, a shock to the system to the GOP, trying to push them back to the basic tenets of smaller government and fight more against the rise of a more radical form of progressivism ushered in by Obama.
Enter Trump. A person that toyed with running as a Reform Party candidate in the 1990. Was one of the most well known Boomers of his generation. The poster boy of 1980s wealth. He wrote at least one book in the early 2000s which was essentially the Reform Party platform and is largely the same platform he operates from today.
Again, now almost fully in retirement age. A high percentage of the Boomer generation was the single largest voting block for the most outsider presidential candidate in American history. A candidate running on a modified platform that has been around since 1992 that pushes back against almost all of the things some of you around here blame on the Boomers.
I can assure you, if Gen X had followed more of this contingent of Boomers lead back in 1992 and through today and the Rest modest Gen X and the youngest Boomers had not raised a bunch of knucklehead Millennials, the political landscape and momentum for a smaller government would be much different in the last 25 years than it has been.
So in Summary, there is a lot of blame to spread around to generations born from 1885-2000. There is a very high percentage of Boomers that are owed a thank you by anyone in the younger generations like myself, for leading the charge on the idea of smaller less intrusive government, trade policies that benefit the American worker and middle class, tax policy that benefits all of us, immigration policy that puts the American worker first.
And I will throw this one in for good measure even though I'm not a big fan of what it had become, the reality is that Alternate forms of media to push back against the highly progressive mainstream media, starting with Limbaugh(a boomer) and AM talk radio to Fox News, to all the various alt media platforms today. None of it would exist without the Boomers hunger for alternates starting in the mid 1980s and moving forward.
So yeah, other than all that. Boomers stink.
