“Most of the damage caused by the boomers was due to easy credit.”
What, that whole tune in, turn on, drop out nonsense? The massive rise in illegitimacy and in divorce? Sure, some Boomers did the right thing, but as said, most boomers are not FReepers.
The massive rise in entitlements is directly connected to boomers not taking care of their own families. And we have to try to pare these entitlements back.
You’ve got a point. The decline in middle class morals began in the 1960’s and 70’s. We set up a system to help the poor and it wound up destroying the poor family structure. Then, it bled over into the middle class. But the welfare programs of the 1930’s-60’s were written by The Greatests, not the boomers. The Greatests also took us to Vietnam, which gave the young boomers a reason to create a counter-culture and reject Christian morals.
Then, credit got easy and out of control materialism pumped up the economy for a while. The poor started seeing the good economy and demanding, “I want the same stuff that the middle class has”. The economy was good and the government could always borrow more, so no one had a reason to tell them no. The entitlements went from an emergency handout to get you back on your feet to a way of life for a sub-culture. Even today, the entitlements are never enough because someone always wants “mo stuff”.
Add to that the fact that automation and outsourcing has significantly reduced the need for workers, and you now throw a lot of the middle class into the entitlement class.
If you want to pare back entitlements now, you better be prepared for civil war. I’m not saying that we can’t do it. I agree with you that its essential to our survival, but we are all to blame for this and we’re all going to have to give up something to move forward. Blaming it all on the generation that is about to start dying off is the easy way out. The Greatests earned that title because of the sacrifices they made over a 4 year period. If we all face our current situation with honesty and a sense of shared sacrifice, we will be rememebered as the real Greatest Generation(s). If we don’t, there won’t be much of a nation left to curse us in the future.