re: Are Boomers to blame for the current state of the country?

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Why blame a generation? We sold our industrial capacity to make a very few wealthy and give us cheaper shite. We all got distracted and paid more attention to what celebrities were doing or betting on kids games. We checked out of our kid's education and worried more about if they thought we were cool parents or not. We gave in to hedonism, stopped having respect for others and teaching respect to our children. We sneered at age and created virtual shrines to ourselves and then basked in our narcissism.

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I wish I had more than a single up vote to give this post!



Can I get an AMEN!

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Liberals are to blame regardless of the generation

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Spot on

Ask em again about their attitude towards wealth redistribution when they are as old as the Boomers are now.

Yes. Mostly.

I'm an aspiring entrepreneur. I, with 2 partners, own and operate 2 fast-casual restaurants and a food truck. Our annual revenue in 2025 will be roughly 2.5 million. We did this more or less on our own, starting as a pop-up and working our way up to leasing brick and mortars. I'm also a full-time W2 engineer because that's what it takes to make it today.

If I wanted to buy either of the properties we currently lease, with standard money down, the mortgage would be nearly double our rent and nearly eat any liquid margin leftover in exchange for "equity".

So we continue on, saving cash to hopefully buy a property one day. I am proud and grateful for that opportunity. My only frustration is that I've done basically everything I can to do it the right way, but the reward is 10x the cost it was for the person I'm leasing from. They are boomers.

Maybe it's not their fault but somewhere along the way triple net NNN leases became standard for commercial properties. This means I maintain the property, pay the property tax and insurance for the right to use the property for material gain.

So my frustration may be misplaced, but when a generation buys property for pennies on the dollar, leases it and abandons all responsibility for the property, it is really hard to catch up. It would be nice if they lowered rent to expedite our savings so we could be property owners someday, or if they leased to own. In my experience so far it's just a cash cow for them and there's no help in sight. I won't quit though.

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I feel like my parents (I'm a millennial but identify as Gen X...

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We must be long lost cousins.

I feel the same way


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- Lower-middle class, or comfortable working class, was a thing then. I just don't think it really is now in any practical sense. Many boomers lived through a period where a working class guy could raise a family of four in a modest SFH in a place where you could send your kids to school in a very modest area without significant safety/behavioral/etc. concerns and where they'd get a reasonably decent education because of the nature of the community around them. I just don't think that exists, and it's a major disconnect.

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This is a big one.

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- Entitlement is only part of the issue when bootstrap culture is limited by the fact that you can't realistically go create familial wealth by opening up a barber shop or working really hard at the mill for 50 years, etc. The routes to bootstrap success exist, but they're narrower and will most often require something other than mere grit. Now, I do think hard work and grit can lead to a fulfilling and relatively secure life even now, but I think the "top end" of that has come down.

- A regular guy can start a plumbing business that is very successful and gets bought by a PE company for life-changing money. But there are things that weren't there in the 60s - high saturation, broader reach of small-mid businesses, etc. that mean fewer people can realistically pursue those paths, at least to high end success.

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Sure, there are pathways that don't exist now that existed then, but there are pathways that exist now that didn't exist then.

Namely, anything that has to do with the internet. Online stores, online services like transcription or insurance billing that used to have to be done onsite but can be done remotely now, social media advertising businesses, all of which can get big enough to generate generational wealth and can be started and launched for a fraction of what Grandaddy had to risk to start a brick and mortar business back in the day.

And yeah, there's saturation in any of those markets, but there are still people succeeding in them. I would argue that there are just as many succeeding in them as there used to be succeeding in the business opportunities that used to exist, but specifically because the barriers to entry are so much lower, there are more people trying.

There's no doubt that there aren't as many pathways to success doing completely physical menial work (working at the mill fro 50 years, as you say) as there used to be due to technological advances and the fact that we outsource so much of that now, but stuff naturally changes.

You can probably find one or two guys doing old fashioned blacksmithing within a day's drive of you, for example, but you probably won't find many more than that because the demand for that service is almost completely gone.

But growing up in the 70s I never heard anybody blaming the generation of people who were born around 1900 or so (basically people my grandparent's age) for ruining the demand for blacksmiths like people are obsessed with blaming Boomers for everything they don't like about 2025.

It's become insufferable and tiresome.

One thing that people obsessed with complaining about this sort of stuff never acknowledge is that when you compare people buying a house in 1980 with people buying a house in 2025, for example, you aren't comparing the same thing.

Houses were 40% smaller then. And the appointments (countertops, backsplashes, knobs, faucets, etc.) then were cheap crap compared to standard appointments now. Standard now would have been considered custom luxury then.

Someone driving a Honda Accord now with 200,000 miles on it is driving a more reliable vehicle with fewer performance problems and maintenance issues and just as much life left on it as someone driving a brand new Chevy sedan in 1975.

The pinnacle of home entertainment back then was having one of those t.v.s that was built into a large wooden cabinet and what was considered then to be a nice stereo system. You may or may not have cable.

Now people have multiple t.v.s with larger screens, much better definition, can stream anything they want on demand—at home or anywhere they want on their wireless phone, which everyone has. I have a bluetooth speaker system that is about twice the size of a stick of butter that sounds better than the stereo we had growing up, and I can instantly play just about anything I can think of through it off my phone for $10 a month.

I have a tankless water heater that supplies an unlimited amount of hot water. Growing up we used to have to shower in shifts because after the second or third shower you had to wait to give the water heater time to heat up again.

Basically what I am trying to say is that everything that contributes to quality of life is better now than it was then. Even someone who can't yet afford to buy a house in 2025 is living better than someone we would have thought of as being upper middle class back then.

But that never gets factored into any of this. And you know what? If someone is going to blame the Boomers for all the things they don't like, then they also have to give them credit for what they do like.

Everybody responsible for improving all of that technology? Probably Boomers.

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The democrat party is the party of boomers white MAGA is the youth

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uh...you don't actually believe this do you?

Too large of a generation that has continued to work longer into older age and not selling their homes for retirement living.