OK, Boomers: 10 ways you totally screwed over GenX

September 21, 2023

There is very little love lost between the Baby Boomer generation and the one that followed it, Generation X. According to the Boomers, they gave the world Woodstock, social transformation, and political activism that dismantled the patriarchy. Generation X, they feel, should be grateful.

All fine and good, but to many Gen Xers, the Baby Boomers made a real hash of things. If you’re skeptical, please read ahead and see 10 ways GenXers feel completely screwed over by the Boomers. It may not change your mind, but it may provide insight into why GenX hasn’t dubbed the Boomers “the greatest generation.”

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1. Soaring education costs

If you’ve looked at what college tuition costs these days, it’s no mystery why Generation X spent decades paying off their college loans. However, certain members of the preceding generation have been only too happy to admonish young people for complaining about it when they themselves spent less than $100 for a college education.

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2. Climate change

It doesn’t take a meteorological genius to look at changing weather patterns and deduce that maybe, just maybe, the calamity that we’re in the midst of is man-made. GenX has been sounding the alarm about this for years, but a 2022 study said that in 2015, people over 60 (cough cough Boomers cough cough) caused nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

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3. Real estate shortages

Baby Boomers screwed over GenX when it comes to housing shortages, but in fairness, they’re living longer and don’t want to move into assisted living facilities when they don’t have to. Still, in 2021, they held 44% of real estate wealth compared to 31% for GenX, and it may be a long time before those born between 1965 and 1980 can catch up.

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4. Threats to social security

For years, social security has provided a safety net for people who have aged out of the workforce, and the Boomers certainly helped themselves to it when they became eligible. Now, some Boomer politicians have decided it’s time to let the program fade into the sunset. So if you’re in your 50s today and social security goes away before you can collect, you know who to blame.

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5. Political polarization

To hear Boomers tell it, there used to be a time when Democrats and Republicans disagreed on policy but behaved in a civilized manner towards each other. To hear GenX tell it, when the first Boomer president, Bill Clinton, was elected in 1992, both sides of the aisle came at each other like rabid piranhas, a state of affairs that has only intensified. It remains to be seen if GenX politicians can break the cycle, but they’ve got their work cut out for them.

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6. Infrastructure blues

If you drive on our nation’s highways, you may notice that not everything is quite up to snuff. The roads we drive on are just one example of our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, and since Boomer politicians have held the purse strings for several decades now, it falls to them to explain why a single pothole can’t get fixed, much less why job-creating infrastructure projects that should be broadly popular seem to be as rare as 17-year cicadas.

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7. Bye-bye, Fairness Doctrine

Baby Boomer Dennis R. Patrick was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the late 1980s and oversaw the death of the Fairness Doctrine. This policy required that broadcasters present differing viewpoints, so if a news station said in an editorial comment that we must have gun control, ordinary Joes could offer a rebuttal on the same network. One minute watching Fox News or MSNBC will demonstrate what was lost when the policy went away.

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8. Saying you turned out fine when you didn’t turn out fine

If you’re a Gen Xer on social media, you’ll see many posts from contemporaries saying their parents were never home, the closest thing they had to parental supervision was a house key, and things like bicycle helmets were unheard of. They will also hasten to add that they turned out fine, a Stockholm Syndrome-esque statement symptomatic of having Boomer parents who were asleep at the switch.

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9. Stagnant wage growth

People from Generation X have experienced stagnant wage growth, making it impossible to hit the same financial milestones their parents hit at the same age. You can place the blame for that mainly on supply-side economics, a horrific disease that took root during the 1980s and has yet to be crushed like an insect as it deserves to be.

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10. The United States still won’t do business with Cuba

Many Baby Boomers remember the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty vividly, so understandably, some might feel like doing business with Havana is like doing business with a terrorist organization. Having said that, Fidel Castro has been dead for seven years, and while relations between the countries have improved, there’s still a long way to go before trade relations aren’t stuck in 1963. Enough already.

This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.

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