Free Republic

Among the many hard truths for those trying to enter America's brutal housing market, here's one: Baby boomers continue to own many of the country's large houses, even after their households have shrunk to one or two people. Baby boomer empty nesters own twice as many of the country's three-bedroom-or-larger homes, compared with millennials with kids, according to a recent analysis from Redfin. That means those larger homes aren't hitting the market, one factor limiting the supply for the younger generations who could use those extra bedrooms. Some baby boomers, the generation now between the ages of 60 and 78,...

A news release from the Census Bureau published on Thursday morning summarized three-quarters of a century of American history succinctly. It was titled, “America Is Getting Older.” This is the Census Bureau, so the assertion was backed up with data. The median age in the U.S. rose to 38.9 years in 2022, up 0.2 years from 2021. Over the past year, 46 states saw increases in their median ages. Four states (and D.C.) saw no change. This isn’t surprising but is, instead, a continuation of a long-standing trend. But there is an important detail that’s easy to overlook here: The...

Ugliness awaits most boomers nearing retirement, not only have they been lied to, but they also have to deal with rigged markets, corruption, and incompetent advisors. Boomers make up the second-largest generation in American history, it consists of over 72 million individuals. Those that haven't already retired are getting ready to. A big problem is most have little in the way of savings.Adding to this problem is that the generations following the baby boomer generation are even worse off and America's economic picture is less than rosy. It does not help that Americans have been encouraged over the years to...

Arnold Skolnick, the artist best-known for creating the iconic poster for Woodstock, has died at the age of 85. Deadline, citing Skolnick’s son, Alexander, said the artist died June 15 due to respiratory failure. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Skolnick was reportedly just five years old when he began dreaming of becoming an artist. As an adult, he worked as a freelancer serving many of New York’s ad agencies. In 1969, he received a phone call from John Morris, the production coordinator of Woodstock. The festival had initially enlisted David Edward Byrd -- known for designing rock concert posters for the...

Update: A representative for Carlos Santana released the following statement: "Rock Legend Carlos Santana was over-taken by heat exhaustion and dehydration during a concert Tuesday (July 5) evening in Michigan. The guitar great was taken from his show at Pine Knob Music Theatre (formerly DTE Energy Music Theatre), an outdoor amphitheater in Clarkston, some 40 miles northwest of Detroit, Michigan. Carlos was taken to the emergency department at McLaren Clarkston for observation and is doing well, it was announced by Santana’s manager Michael Vrionis tonight. The statement also noted that tomorrow night's (July 6) show in Burgettstown, Pa. would be...

Retiring Baby Boomers Must Avoid Living In These StatesRetiring Baby Boomers Must Avoid Living In These StatesMillions of Baby Boomers retire each year from the US labor force. They must make the difficult decision if their current home state is worth living out their “golden years” of adulthood. To simplify the process of what states are the best for retirees in 2021. The finance website Bankrate provides new data of the worst states to retire in this year. Bankrate examined five essential factors: affordability, wellness, culture, weather, and crime for each state. Affordability and wellness were weighted the most, 40%...

No one likes to think of their own mortality or realize they have more days behind them than ahead. But one sure way to realize you’re on the back 9 is when the music you grew up with starts showing up on the “oldies” or classic rock station. Personally, I don’t have to worry about that – the music I liked growing up was wildly unpopular in its time and will never make a classic rock station. But the music Baby boomers grew up on is also what we Gen X’ers grew up with, having it forced on us by...

Famous Actor Regrets How He Raised His Baby Boomer Kids - YouTube Autogenerated transcript below for those who don't want to watch the video (lacks punctuation, sometimes provides incorrect words) I think that I and I assume millions of others of my generationwanted some of the things that we did for our childrenand our wives and ourselves.Was explained by the fact that we were products ofwhat is called the depression. Sadly, they saymany young people today don't even know what that term means.It means that everybody was poor.Statistically almost everybody was poor for about 10 years.Starting with the stock...

On May 15, 2020, my husband and I walked into a Maryland hospital delivery ward, our faces fully masked but hiding big smiles. I was scheduled to deliver my second baby boy. He was one of the 3.6 million babies born last year into a world of uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus. A potential silver lining to the very dark coronavirus cloud was that our nation might experience a baby boom. Unfortunately, a bump in births did not materialize; births fell yet again in 2020 to a low not seen since 1979. New life is a mark of a...

The Greatest generation, or G.I. generation, is generally defined as people born from 1901 to 1927; many of our parents populated that generation. The Baby Boomer generation was born between 1946 and 1964, after WWII and at the beginning of Vietnam. Both generations are being accosted, sometimes physically in blue check cities, but certainly psychologically and spiritually, by the Gen Z generation born between 1996 and 2013 and the late Millennial generation born from 1990-1996. New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz has identifies this group as America’s most socialist and misanthropic generation—dystopian socialists.  One only has to review the sickening recordings...

A reboot of “The Wonder Years” has landed a pilot production commitment at ABC. The new half-hour comedy series would focus on how a black middle class family in Montgomery, Alabama in the turbulent late 1960’s made sure it was The Wonder Years for them too. That puts the new show in the same time period as the original series, which was set between 1968 and 1973. A mini writer’s room for the show will be opened once ABC approves a pilot script. Saladin K. Patterson will write and executive produce. Lee Daniels and Marc Velez will executive produce via...

Louis Rosemont called Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood home for almost 40 years. He was part of one of the first waves of immigrants to build the community after fleeing a violent dictatorship in his homeland. But he has recently found himself exiled again — priced out of his home by rising rents as climate change rearranges the Miami real estate market. Little Haiti is a historically low-income neighborhood that sits inland, on land at double the elevation of wealthier neighborhoods along the beachfront. In Miami, a city often considered ground zero for the impacts of climate change, sea level rise...

Today the average American is 20 years younger than their representative in Congress. This should come as no surprise, considering that over the past 30 years the average age of a Member of Congress has increased with almost every new Congress. In 1981, the average age of a Representative was 49 and the average of a Senator was 53. Today, the average age of a Representative is 57 and the average of a Senator is 61. This prompted us to take a further look at those graying averages. Democratic leaders in the House are two decades older than Republican leaders....

2020 is here, and many people are excited about starting a new decade. Yet for those who watch Social Security's financial condition, New Year's Day just means we're a year closer to the challenges facing the key government program.This year is likely to be the last one that Social Security manages to keep its spending under a key psychological level. Starting in 2021, the amount of money that the Social Security Administration spends on benefits for retirees and survivors of retired workers will exceed $1 trillion for the first time -- and that's just the beginning of an upward surge...

The pitched battle over impeachment is the last-gasp struggle of a generation that has dominated American politics, media and culture for more than half a century — the Baby Boomers. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. I say this as a member of that tribe (although one on the, ahem, younger end of the timeline), someone who’s lived through the endless political and cultural wars painted in stark black-and-white by a group that only sees life in terms of Us-vs.-Them. It’s a generation, convinced of its own importance, that refuses to leave the public stage: The president,...

Of the rock festivals of the sixties, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was by far the most famous. Held on a 600-acre dairy farm near Bethel, N.Y. on August 15–17, 1969, the festival is the iconic representation of the drug-addled culture and sexual revolution that upended American life. This August marks the fiftieth anniversary of the era-defining event. Some have called for celebrating with another concert. The occasion is hardly a cause for celebration—so many of the cultural changes after Woodstock had catastrophic consequences. Most do not know that the concert was a disaster—even from an organizational point of...

Waterloo Of Boomer Catholics This is pretty amazing. A couple of Portland readers have sent me this story about what happened when the Catholic archbishop of Portland sent a priest in to reform a wackadoodle progressive parish that had gone native. The Oregonian’s report on it is hysterically biased, making the priest look like a monster; the reporter never once appears to have considered that Catholicism is a religion that has clear norms, and this parish’s previous leadership had seriously violated them, for a long time. Anyway, from the story about St. Francis parish, identified by the newspaper as having...

Baby Boomers are retiring. Most are now starting to take their pensions and Social Security. The more fortunate are beginning to dip into their IRAs and 401Ks. As we reach this milestone, our views tend to harden. We are growing less tolerant. Some may call it cranky. We don’t buy a lot of the nonsense that is shoved down our throats by so many of the so called experts on television. We frequently find ourselves yelling back at them. We are even less tolerant of all the politically correct BS. As our circulation slows, we look forward to spending more time in...

Baby Boomers are retiring. Most are now starting to take their pensions and Social Security. The more fortunate are beginning to dip into their IRAs and 401Ks. As we reach this milestone, our views tend to harden. We are growing less tolerant. Some may call it cranky. We don’t buy a lot of the nonsense that is shoved down our throats by so many of the so called experts on television. We frequently find ourselves yelling back at them. We are even less tolerant of all the politically correct BS. As our circulation slows, we look forward to spending more...

It may seem a bit anti-climatic but this is the story that stuck in my craw like a tablespoon of cinnamon - Boomer Bequest Is Millennial Misery –  subtitle: Saddled with student and public debt, today’s young adults will long pay the price for our elders’ folly. A hat tip to the copyeditor, just reading it raised my blood pressure. It also succinctly summarizes the article and lets you know out of the box that it was written by one of the aggrieved generation. Boomers invented the Happy Face which Millennials appropriated and turned into Frowny FaceBuckle up buttercups, this...