Your G-g-g-g-g-generation Sucks
Here’s a story that will shock absolutely nobody in my age bracket:
But Gen Xers who own small businesses will, for starters, greet the new year with the payroll tax reverting to its 1990s levels. This is especially pernicious for the self-employed, who must pay both the employer and employee side of the tax.
Our cohort was hit harder than any other during the Great Recession, and the middle class under age 45 is likely to get battered again even if Congress and the White House come to the kind of solution that Washington pundits deem responsible. If Congress doesn’t fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (which it typically does yearly — but never indexes for inflation), it will smack folks in the $75,000 a year range, which is above the average American salary but hardly represents the “millionaires and billionaires” President Obama is so fond of excoriating.
In the same way that we at the kids’ table crane our necks to hear what the grownups are talking about, we watch as the president invites the bosses of big labor unions to the White House one day and the CEOs of major corporations the next.
“We’re all in this together” is a great talking point — unless your generation is among the groups hit hardest by tax increases, yet also with the smallest voice to do anything about it.
We were the generation the Baby Boomers were too busy doing –whatever– to raise, and now we’ll be the ones stuck, once again, with the bill for their good times.
We’re used to it. We don’t like it. But we’re used to it.
Our generation’s motto, if we were big and loud and self-absorbed enough to have one, would be, “Never trust anyone born between 1946 and 1964.”
I’m 42, and this is bang-on. I loathe the boom generation. One silver lining of the coming economic crash, if it happens soon enough, will be getting to watch the boomers starve to death underneath freeway overpasses. I can’t wait for the day the last one dies so I can piss on the grave.
Lighten up, Francis
Now that you mention it, that might be our generation’s motto.
i know that boomers are a popular target today. however, many of the things we are blamed for we inherited, too. social security? 1935. medicare? 1965. medicaid? also 1965. not a lot of boomers voting then. i agree that we should have killed them off. the generations following are getting screwed. check the demographics in the last election, i think that you will find that the people about to get screwed the worst voted for obama.
about the worst thing that one can be today is a highly educated, white male boomer. add in christian or atheist and it is pretty much open season.
generations overlap and blend together. 1946-1964 really didn’t get us here alone.
just sayin’
let the rock throwin’ begin
Young liberals, getting more conservative as they age, it’s an old story.
But I think you’ll find that those “conservatives” who stayed home rather than vote for Romney were mostly Boomers, turned off by Ryan always talking about changing SS and Medicare just before they’re about to retire.
Not noted: The oldest Gen-Xers have been voting for almost 30 years. For whom and on what did Gen-X vote for, themselves? Looks like the generation born between 1965 and 1985 hasn’t set the world on fire, either.
As a GenX’er myself, I prefer Nirvana to the Beatles.
I agree that the boomers aren’t solely responsible for the disaster we’re heading into. The roots go much, much deeper — well over a century, politically, and further back than that philosophically.
As for my generation (which I identify as Thirteeners, following the terminology of Strauss & Howe) — we’re currently between 32 to 52 years old. The leading edge of our generation is only now starting to move into positions of real political power. What if anything we’ll do with it largely remains to be seen.
I remember when I first started to dislike baby boomers back in the 70′s. It was because I hit my sexually active teenage years right at the same time that they managed to completely screw up the sexual revolution. I ask you, how lame do you have to be to screw up a simple thing like sex? I dont know either but they managed to do it. You know whats worse? They wont shut up about it! Just when you think its safe, boom, they figure out some way to screw it all up again in a totally different way. There I was, 17, ready to go be a part of the cool Playboy lifestyle and boom! it was over in a flood of herpes and aids outbreaks. It was like showing up to a party 5 minutes after the cops got there.
It used to be that the two greatest benefits to being gay were that you didnt have to serve in the military and you didnt have to even think about getting married. Whoops! look at that, another example of how baby boomers took something that worked for everyone and made everyone eat an excrement sandwich instead.
Full disclosure, I was born in 61, but I do not in anyway like or associate myself with the whole generation that was born directly after the war. All I remember of the 60′s was the space race and the 70′s, well I used to say that the 70′s were the worst 10 years ever. Unfortunately I know have a new candidate for that.
The guy that played Skippy on Family Ties summed it up in his act.
“Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll. Sounds pretty good. What do we get? AIDS, Crack and Madonna.”
The guy that played Skippy on Family Ties summed it up.
“Sex, Drugs and Rock&Roll. Sounds pretty good. What do we get? AIDS, Crack and Madonna.”
Interestingly, Strauss & Howe date the Thirteenth generation from 1961 through 1981. Their generational model is build around common experience rather than purely demographic transitions. As I recall they date the start of the boom generation to 1943 as well, which is a touch earlier than the demographic bulge.
I’m a leading edge GenXer (late 60s BDay). And I’ve said for a couple decades now that if the US can survive the Boomers, we’ll be OK.
I’m getting less and less sure we’l survive the Boomers, though.
As someone born in 1964, I have one simple request: please don’t lump me in with the baby boomer. We hateses them, the nasty boomerses.
Same here, rbj.
Boomers are like rats. Individually they are cute, intelligent, and make wonderful companions. En masse they bring poverty, destruction, and death.
…sucks precious resources out of the economy,especially the resources most closely guarded by policymakers.
the boom booms have secured their permanent dominant place in our culture (again?).
Does a black hole “boom?”
If Hawking is right about them, yes.
Nice rants youngsters. I am a late boomer (born 1960) and all I can say to you X-ers, etc. who want to blame “us” for your ills–get bent. I work my keester off and have since I was 7 years old. Any real retirement I get will be because I saved for it, not because of SS. I saw the death of defined pensions by the time I was 30. Who do I blame for that? Medicare isn’t a free ride, either, you know. You have to pay for Part B, to the tune of about $2,500 / year / couple. You youngsters remind me of the dude at the bus stop whose friend beats him at a video game and when he says “I like to win” the old lady next to him corrects him with “you like to WHINE.” Y’all get the leaders you vote for, therefore deserve.
I do not identify with the baby boomers, ca. 1962. Idiots.