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The Boomer Bust

Thursday, July 31, 2003
By Radley Balko

...Don’t get me wrong, some of my best parents are baby boomers. But the most self-aware, self-congratulatory, and self-destructive generation in American history is aging. Boomers are catching faint glimpses of their own mortality. They’re beginning to see themselves in nursing homes, convalescent centers and retirement communities. And so the generation that introduced us to political identity groups (search) and the culture of victimization now sees itself as an identity group, and an aging generation of victims. And now they want entitlements.

Consequently, my fellow Gen-Xers, you and I will be footing the bill, for example, for an $800 billion prescription drug benefit egged on, voted on and signed into law by baby boomers. Soon we’ll be paying for the God-given right of our parents to, for example, get erections well into their seventies....

Boomers I think suffer from a natural inferiority complex. The generation just before them -- the World War II generation (search) -- saved the world, after all. And when your parents saved the world, what, really, can you do to better them?

So when boomers aren’t busy voting themselves entitlements to prolong their lives, they’re striving for immortality -- if not for “Greatest Generation” (search) status, which is taken, then at least for “The ‘Damn the Results, At Least We Tried’ Generation.”

So we can also thank well-meaning leftist boomers for the litany of social safety net programs that have resulted in, ahem, more people in need of government-funded safety net programs. We can thank boomer idealism for the wars on poverty (search) and drugs that gave us, ahem, more poverty and more drug use.

Our current boomer president wants to change the world, too. And like his leftist boomer cohorts, he too will be sending us the bill....