"Baby boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy"

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Boomers soaked up a lot of economic opportunity without bothering to preserve much for the generations to come. They burned a lot of cheap fossil fuels, filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, and will probably never pay the costs of averting catastrophic climate change or helping their grandchildren adapt to a warmer world. They took control of Washington at the turn of the millennium, and they used it to rack up a lot of federal debt, even before the Great Recession hit.

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Congress has been controlled by a baby boom majority since the beginning of the George W. Bush administration.

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Did that majority sock away money for future safety-net costs? No. Pols talked about putting budget surpluses in a “lockbox,” but not for long. Instead they cut their own taxes, they deficit-financed two wars, they approved a new Medicare prescription drug benefit that their generation will be the first to enjoy in full. Partly as a result of those policies, the federal budget deficit has averaged 4 percent of GDP in the Bush/Obama era, more than double the average rate of the 50 years before that. Boomers let federal debt, as a share of the economy, double from where it was in 1970.

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Meanwhile, they stood by while the economic bargain that lifted them as young workers began to unravel for their children. They opened global trade and watched millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs vanish; research by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues suggests that normalized trade with China, the biggest driver of those losses, has by itself cost America at least 2 million jobs.

Then, boomers didn’t invest enough in new training programs for young workers, particularly men, who once could count on factory jobs to bring them a middle-class lifestyle. They allowed college costs to more than double from 1982 to 2012. Though, point in their favor: Many of them took out loans to send their children to school.

Boomers let public investments in research and development — a critical driver of future prosperity — fall steadily as a share of the economy; they’re down from 1.2 percent of GDP in 1976 to 0.8 percent today, a decline of one-third. In the 15 years boomers have been running the federal government, economic growth has slid well below the average of a generation ago — to 1.9 percent a year, down from 3.2 percent for the preceding 25 years. Some of the brightest minds of their generation built fortunes working at Wall Street investment banks, then helped drive the economy into its worst recession since the Great Depression.

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