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.”