GFY, Car Czar.
You progressive baby boomers have made life difficult for everyone you touch: Your parents, your children, and the poor group trapped between you and your offspring, Generation X.
As for your poor babies earning less despite college educations, you were the ones who pushed college on them, sent them to private prep schools, sent them to an expensive private university, and then let them major in African Queer Gender Studies.
Here is the truth: Those grievance studies majors deserve to be earning $8/hour as a barrister compared to $60K/year starting salary the middle class person who went to State Tech and got an engineering degree is earning.
For crying out loud. I basically grew up during the Nixon-Ford-Carter depression, and graduated high school right after the bottom of the Reagan strong dollar policy induced recession. In high school I watched Burger King shutter all of its stores in the area, and grocery stores go out of business, and local unemployment reach a historic high that has never been surpassed.
When I graduated college with a shiny new Aerospace Engineering degree, it was into the new world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that also meant the defense industry collapsed, and took its engineering jobs with it. A short time later, Iraq invaded Kuwait, oil prices spiked, and what little was left of the aerospace industry collapsed. Many of my college classmates in the aerospace industry were laid off less than 18 months after being hired. Fortunately, I had entered the Air Force. However, the military had its own massive reductions in force sending many to the unemployment lines. I missed RIF eligibility by only a few months.
I did take on a small amount of student loan debt, quickly paid back my small private loan, and I deferred my federal loans for three years. During that time, I saved aggressively, and then paid the loan off in their entirety when the deferment was over.
I left the military for the IT industry in the late 1990s. Now earning more, I could invest more in the stock market, which conveniently collapsed with the dot com bubble burst a few years later.
I could go on. Buying houses in the middle of a real-estate boom, moving on the bust, etc., etc., etc. But, I never did a cash-out refi. I did do several cash-in refis.
Despite the timing of my life, I am reasonably financially secure because I am reasonably financially responsible.
Most of the people I knew of my generation graduated college and their first home was an apartment, often times sharing an apartment with a coworker or friend. Their first car was a used car. They probably did not have a credit card.
Your generation venerates victimhood, and because of that has raised a generation who believe they are destined to be a victim based on their conditions. They believe when they should be able to study a useless major and be paid $100K because they attended an elite college.
I can go on. Your generation kept your children away from all that was good, and taught responsibility, like the Boy Scouts. You kept your kids out of team sports, where they could learn about winning and losing. You didn’t let them work summer jobs when they were teenagers, instead putting them into SAT prep programs. And church and moral education? Forget it. You did not build responsible men and women, you built perennial children.
You have reaped what you sowed, but still blame “the economy”, “the recession”, “college costs”, etc.
And it is not your children who will have to clean up your mess, it is my generation, Generation X.
Just finished reading your post and all I can say is, “Oh,my!!!”.
I was the generation that preceded The Boomers,the Silent Generation (aka The Forgotten Generation).
I agree with much of what you said. The Boomers didn’t think much of folks my age and were determined not to be like us.
They succeeded-—they were nothing like us.
.