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Gen Xers I know very little about. Nirvana and the 90s tech boom whiz kids is pretty much it, so far as I've seen. But demographically they're a dip, not a boom, so they don't really seem to have the numbers to be a boomer-style cultural force.

I was under the impression that the Clinton years were some sort of boomer wet dream revenge for Nixon, not something due to gen X, but I suppose you have a point - the moonbat faction of the boomers couldn't have come to political power over the sane boomers without help from Xers.

Gen Yers, I would guess, are probably the slowest out of the box of any generation yet because:

(1) Given the tremendous tech advances society has made (and that is mostly boomers, thank you, the industrious and inventive faction of the boomers), for the vast majority of fields, a heck of a lot of education is needed to really contribute substantially to society. Many boomer parents see that education as a worthwhile investment. Insofar as their children enter engineering and biology research and 4-year or Masters nursing programs and the like, I don't disagree. Insofar as parents often end up funding a 5-year frat party so their children can drink and bugger their way to a Gender Studies degree, I do.

(2) A huge number of gen Yers are really disturbed, dysfunctional people who have no values of their own (basically, apathetic nihilists) and can't function outside of the system of their youth, where there is an authority figure telling them exactly what to do each minute. Without that constant supervision they turn into blobs in front of a TV or videogame screen... rendering them incapable of functioning outside of high school environments. This group is going to spend a long time as parents'-basement-livers, and when they do finally get off their bums, I doubt it will be to do more than flip burgers to get money to smoke pot.

I think these two groups account for most of the slowness of gen Y getting out of the box... I hope for a lot of interesting work, eventually, from a subset of the former (there both the liberals and conservatives in the former), and expect nothing but impotent whining on DU from the latter.

"However, before you burn up the last of your remaining brain cells fretting over this, I fully expect Congress to face a fiscal reality in the next decade or so and reduce the government bennies for the boomers."

I hope you are right but my fear is that boomers may choose the route of the railroad unions... voting to drive the thing into the ground rather than give up an inch of entitlement. I fear the new prescription drug benefit is a harbinger of that path.

A lot of good points in your post. Let me address a couple. While I am generally pretty hard on Gen X/Yers, I also have to acknowledge that they got screwed on the education side and, that is one complaint that they are justified laying at boomer's feet. The aging hippies that we contributed to the world of academia realy sold the X/Yers short. They know next to nothing of American history, the Constitution, math or science. Thanks to Clinton killing off the Super-Conducting SuperCollider, we lost a huge opportunity to spark a rebirth in the interest of all things engineering and/or scientific. Now, with engineering jobs being shipped offshore, we have taken a definite leap down the slippery slope of irrelevance. Like many great nations that have gone before us, we are headed down a disturbing path.

The issue with Yers is more acute. These folks have grown up in a world filled with computers, VCRs, Nintendos and Gameboys. Because they spend so much time in isolation either palying video games or playing on the computer, (as a group) they lack well-developed social skills or much of a sense of reality. I worked as a substitute teacher for a couple of years and was surprised by the majority of the kids I encountered. Most of them are convinced that they will either be pro athletes or music stars. I hate to think of the rude awakening these kids are in for when they discover that someone is going to fix cars and someone will have to deliver bread and someone will have to build houses and buildings. The Yers may, eventually, figure it out and accomplish great things but, currently, I ain't impressed.