I agree with you until your final statement. All these programs were actually put in place during the 1960s and the years soon after. The baby boomers were still in high school and college when most all these programs were begun.
The boomers weren't in control of much of anything until at least the 1980s, and Clinton was the first boomer president beginning in 1992. The boomers have only been in control of the government and other institutions since the late '80s or early '90s, long after the welfare state was firmly entrenched.
The welfare state is a gift from LBJ and the Greatest Generation, not the boomers.
In January 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the Great society program to Congress. He recommended passing of laws that would help education, Medicare, urban renewal, conservation, wide-scale fight against poverty, removal of hindrances to the right to vote, attack on disease, Medicaid, beautification, development of depressed regions, and control and prevention of crime, to which Congress responded by reenacting most of them into laws.
He also signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968 which was the most far reaching and largest gun control federal laws in the history of the United States of America. He was also credited for signing into law the Medicare program which was established on July 30, 1965
I cast the greatest blame on the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers for the steady decline of the USA.
But what do I know?
(SARCASM) I just knew something of the people who actually lived throughout the last century, before it seemingly became acceptable to rewrite history.