Baby Boomers have bankrupted almost all of America’s public institutions, indebted future generations at levels impossible to repay, and delivered us all into the post-COVID dystopia of frayed social fabric and a total loss of public trust.

It’s tempting to claim the Boomers invented adolescence. But that’s not exactly true. Boomers were the first generation to experience extended adolescence. Their long vacation from both the dependencies of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood was engineered and provided by their elders. 

The Great Depression and World War II prematurely bestowed heavy adult burdens onto the Greatest Generation, and they responded to it by ensuring that their own children, the Boomers, would never have to suffer such a cruelly truncated childhood. As a result of this exceptional indulgence, and also due to the sheer size and market share of their huge generation, the Boomers grew up thinking the normal state of American affairs was to have every institution, every cultural endeavor, and every marketing dollar devoted to them. Growing up with this historical aberration, it is not difficult to see how the Boomers could arrive at adulthood convinced that the American dream is something other adults engineer and provide for you.

In the post-World War II economic boom, the American Dream—defined as the young attaining a lifestyle that was as good or better than their parents—was a social compact that adults held with each other for the sake of their children. The Boomers were the first beneficiaries of this social contract of adults, but previous generations were the makers or providers of that prosperity.

The Boomers were also the first generation of kid consumers to enjoy the focus of advertisers, creatives, musicians, and artists, all vying for a market share of the largest and richest generation of idle teenagers in American history. They identify with the moment the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan or their experience with Woodstock, in person or on television. The kids who eagerly consumed movies like Love Story and The Graduate, along with the music of the British Invasion, strongly identified with these products of 1960s and 1970s popular culture. But, of course, they did not make them. The actual producers of the culture around which the Boomers crafted their identity were members of the Silent Generation, born in the 1930s and early 1940s. These adults supplied and sold the Boomers their culture; the Boomers consumed it and saw themselves as synonymous with what they consumed. 

But this giant generation of fortunate sons failed to return the favor when they became adults. Instead of accepting the role of adult and provider to a new generation of young people, the Boomers famously resisted growing up, and shirked adult responsibilities. Why didn’t they extend the generous social contract of adults for the benefit of their children? Their Peter Pan Syndrome perhaps came directly from the indulgence of their youth. Why sell out and become the adult who has to provide that security and make those sacrifices when you can remain a kid and enjoy what others provide for you?

Of course, not all Boomers participated in the Peter Pan Syndrome characteristic of their generation. Many of them followed their parents’ lead and accepted adulthood. But the cultural and political force of the Boomers was decidedly a rebellion from the responsibility of their parents and towards familial and social emancipation. The irresponsible, freewheeling contingent got all the press and most of the cultural power. 

In large part, this split within the generation and subsequent disenfranchisement of the more responsible Boomers is due to the Vietnam War. Many working-class Boomer draftees got the first great wake-up call to the problems with the Boomer mentality that happiness is something other generations are supposed to provide for you. Kids with the smarts and the resources to avoid the draft via college enrollment or social connections stayed home, while their working-class peers made up 76 percent of those sent. Many of the lucky, resourceful Boomers who avoided the draft nevertheless participated in the national shaming, spitting, shunning, and disdain that greeted the working-class vets upon their return home from that unpopular war. 

Vietnam split the Boomer generation in two, empowering bookish and increasingly radical Boomer academics from wealthy backgrounds and demoralizing working-class vets who had mirrored the sacrifice and adult responsibility of the Greatest Generation. Culturally, the radical academics ascended, and the vets disappeared.

Subsequent generations will be left to sort out the massive changes in both the definition and the availability of American prosperity as the Boomers exit the American stage. The left and right disagree on many issues. Still, there is near-unanimous agreement that the “American dream,” defined as the attainment of a lifestyle the same or better than what our parents enjoyed, is no longer on offer for young Americans of average luck or talent. Both political parties acknowledge that the prosperity Boomers inherited from their parents has been squandered, although each party tells a different story about why that is.

The left believes that the Boomers took a wrong turn with Reagan, indulged in the politics of individualism for their own midlife financial gain, and tragically abandoned the civic and community-minded perspective of their parents’ generation. They argue that tax cuts, deregulation, and cutting government spending broke the American dream, empowered corporations at the expense of the middle class, and delivered a capitalist dystopia to subsequent generations.

The right blames the Boomers’ love affair with globalism, which led them to both offshore manufacturing and welcome massive illegal immigration, depressing wages for their American children. The right also cites the hippies’ generation-defining environmentalist delusion, which inspired Boomers to strangle muscular industries such as forestry, mining, agriculture, building, and manufacturing. The policies of the 1980s and 1990s, together with the haunting Vietnam-era lesson Boomers had internalized about the necessity of college education, ushered their children into universities, campus Marxism, and student loan debt. 

The children of the Boomers were offered an American Dream with key stipulations: instead of prosperity on offer to anyone of average talent and good fortune, the kids of the ’80s and ’90s had only one path to prosperity: white-collar jobs requiring a college education. This path required a significant financial outlay for working-class kids, who became the first generation to be saddled with massive student loan debt. The white collar job became synonymous with the American Dream, just as surely as unskilled or noncollege jobs became synonymous with its loss.

The difficulty subsequent generations experience when attempting to approximate, much less exceed, the prosperity of the Boomers is a direct consequence of that undying Boomer expectation that someone else should deliver the goods ready-made.

The Boomers’ legacy is the destruction of the once-prosperous and functioning society they inherited from their parents and the delivery of a hollowed-out, rotten system of defunct institutions and bankrupt social and political organizations to their children. 

The Boomers’ legacy is the destruction of the once-prosperous and functioning society they inherited from their parents and the delivery of a hollowed-out, rotten system of defunct institutions and bankrupt social and political organizations to their children. 

The decay of our public institutions, like K-12 schools, colleges, and our healthcare system, becomes clearer when one considers how much these organizations have changed since the 1980s, when Boomers became the largest voting bloc and began to run the country in earnest. Instead of using these organizations for their stated purposes—to educate, to heal—the Boomer mentality reorganized them into giant work programs for employees. 

Educational institutions’ administrative and support staff has increased exponentially, despite the fact that the digital revolution and a shrinking population of young people should have rendered the additional workforce unnecessary. The pay and retirement benefits to the adults working in these organizations have also skyrocketed, as the results—the education levels of America’s youth, and the health of its citizens—have plummeted. We spend more money and devote more staff to achieving less than ever. And all of those staff members expect lavish retirement and healthcare benefits despite their poor performances.

COVID fully exposed the fundamental reordering of these public institutions, once founded for the benefit of students and patients, to the interests of the adults employed by them. Schools were shut down for months, and kids lost ground in academic instruction, socialization, and childhood development. This was a non-issue for the teachers’ unions and the public education bureaucracies, who focused exclusively on the interests of the employees to the detriment of the people the entire institution was once founded to serve.

The Boomers faced much greater risk from the COVID virus than younger Americans. Yet programming on Fox News and MSNBC alike featured endless fear-mongering stories of young people on the beach in Florida, young people stubbornly attending class and meeting up in public. Young people breaking curfew, young people selfishly trying to go about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. And, of course, young people were at very little risk of any adverse effects. But the Boomers were not willing to quarantine themselves for the sake of the body politic. Instead, they insisted that all must quarantine, all must act as if they feared and risked the same exposure to the virus, when in fact, young people were all but immune to it.

The pandemic revealed to younger Americans the immense jealousy their youth inspired in their elders. Where the Greatest Generation was happy to let the Boomers have their extended youth, the Boomers did not return the favor when circumstances called upon them to sacrifice their own freedoms and autonomy for the sake of the wider country. No—if the Boomers’ old age forced them to isolate, then everyone must isolate. There would be no life, no liveliness permitted. If the virus targets the elderly, then we are all elderly now. No one would be allowed to be young.

Boomers, fully anticipating the Great Society entitlements that they promised to themselves (without the knowledge or permission of future generations, who are on the hook for the bill) failed to have enough children to pay for their lavish benefits.

The effects of this insane public policy had a profound negative impact on America’s young people. They missed school, and they missed key elements of their young adult lives because the adults in charge were loath to allow them to be young and free of the consequences of old age and poor health. The same Boomers who threw off every possible social and moral precept, every single tradition and expectation in their youth, were fantastically intolerant of 2020 youths so much as dipping a toe in rebellion. In much the same way that the Boomers turned our institutions, once ordered for the proper development of future Americans, inside-out to cater to the good of older employees, the Boomer mentality turned the American public against young people during COVID. 

Remember, other generations are responsible for delivering happiness, ready-made, to Boomers. Once their parents were gone, America’s largest generation turned to their children and grandchildren to cater to their needs. Much of this was done without the consent of younger generations, via massive public debt and illegal immigration.

In 1996, the Brookings Institution published “The Budget Meets the Boomers,” a report that detailed America’s looming entitlement crisis for all to see:

The growth in the number of elderly Americans averaged 2 percent annually between 1960 and 1995. In the next 15 years it will actually slow to a 1 percent annual rate before accelerating to 3 percent between 2015 and 2025 when most ‘baby-boomers’ will be retired. But annual growth in the number of workers, which also averaged 2 percent during the past three decades, is projected to slow steadily to only 0.1 percent annually by 2025.

Boomers, fully anticipating the Great Society entitlements that they promised to themselves (without the knowledge or permission of future generations, who are on the hook for the bill), failed to have enough children to pay for them. In an attempt to make the numbers pencil out and goose the economy, Americans have imported hordes of illegal immigrants to provide cheap labor and take the place of the kids Boomers never bothered to have to support them in their old age. This has destroyed the cultural cohesion of the country and has placed their children and grandchildren in a position where they must compete with the entire world now vying for the American Dream.

As the Boomers move to the periphery of public life, age is still “just a number.” But that number is getting more and more unsustainable for younger generations of workers to absorb with anything left to support themselves and their young children. 

The final, twilight Boomer American dream is the total fantasy that America can afford to keep its retirees in the kind of comfort and prosperity they have enjoyed their whole lives. Free health care, free retirement benefits, plentiful housing—all while younger workers enjoy zero security, pay outrageous health premiums and find themselves locked out of our outrageously priced real estate.

Our tax dollars contribute to the administration and staffing of the schools intended to educate our children. But the schools no longer adequately educate our children, so we must pay extra for additional tutoring or private school. Our government services are increasingly suspended or useless, as our tax dollars now offset the cost of public servant pensions and retirement plans. 

The Boomers have bankrupted the country, financially and socially, in reordering it to their own ends. The country lacks enough money, enough young educated workers, or the kind of global security and stable economy to deliver on all of these promises. 

But we don’t dare speak of the reality we are all facing. Entitlements and public employee pensions are the third rail in politics. But math is not subject to debate. America will either silently inflate away our debt and our obligations, impoverishing those on fixed retirement income, or will simply fail to deliver. One way or another, the entitlements older generations promised to themselves at the expense of impoverished younger generations will not be honored. The American Dream for young workers is not to slave away under massive debt, higher taxes, a stagnant economy, out-of-control immigration, and crumbling public services and infrastructure so that our elders may enjoy uninterrupted, undeserved prosperity in their old age.

I don’t know if younger people will have the spines to tell the world’s most childish generation that it’s time to grow up and live in the reality that they themselves have created. 

But I do know one thing: Boomers expect their children to continue the public illusion that Boomers have produced and engineered for us a prosperity similar to what their parents put in place for them. They have done nothing of the sort. They have bankrupted almost all of our public institutions, indebted future generations at levels impossible to repay, and delivered us all into the post-COVID dystopia of frayed social fabric and a total loss of public trust. 

At the very least, younger generations should break free of the Boomer illusion and feel free to say these things out loud. We are not on the hook to weave out of ashes a pretend tapestry of prosperity and security for our profligate elders. Our elders have delivered a damaged political and economic system to us, and we must make do with the reality we have inherited. We can tell them the truth. We are not responsible for manufacturing their dream, particularly when that dream is at odds with our own flourishing. 

The Boomers’ American dream was supplied, ready-made, by their parents. If America is to survive, the younger generations must somehow supply prosperity enough for themselves and their own children.