Welcome to how the rest of the world operates, Amerikkkans. God forbid you have to take care of your child after they turn 18. The idea of having a fully independent kid after they turn 18 only started after America hit the jackpot post wwii, where you could get a job with a firm handshake, and it’s an entirely unsustainable system.
I don’t think it’s unsustainable for parents to not have to support their children after 18 - Because we should have robust society wide support systems so no parents should be struggling to “support” their children of any age.
who do these boomers think is bringing them their treatos and wiping their asses as in home health aides?
other boomers?
no, their retirements and savings are going to be raided by for-profit elder care schemes and scams their children can't protect them from, because their own position is too precarious to chase after mom buying trump bucks or getting sucked into some kind of crooked conservatorship.
helping your children is literally helping yourself and maintaining a trusting relationship with your only advocate in this psycho country of grifters.
American elder care is terrifying. It's basically those old "the savages send their elderly off into the woods to be eaten by wolves" tropes, but real and the wolf is some finance capitalist running a elder care graveyard where they kill your parents and grandparents for profit.
One thing that stuck out to me as absolutely plausible in Tender is the Flesh was that one of the main reasons the protagonist kept his dad in an expensive home was so that when he died there would be a guaranteed cremation that he would personally witness, instead of his father's corpse being sold as cheap meat
“I’m convinced that this weakens our culture and our economy by continuing to coddle adult children and not send them from the proverbial nest to take on that responsibility.”
A very common take with suburban parents in the Anglosphere. I'm so glad I wasn't raised in that culture because I could never deal with that.
It’s almost fash adjacent especially “this weakens out culture”. Also the insanity of the dude saying “I got fleeced by my kids and it’s their fault.”
The value in the boomer home is entirely dependent on the future buyers (Millenials, Gen Z) slaving themselves to unrealistic mortgage terms, and their retirement funds are entirely driven by greater fool asset and company valuations. They created an entire financial system that creates nothing except set up overtly confusing ways to obscure the fact that it's just stealing from their children to pay for the unsustainable boomer lifestyle, and then they have the gall to complain about the negative effects but only in the context of how it effects them.
I think we're past the idea of selling to regular people. You'll just hold your family's wealth in residential housing until you pass it to your children or you get bought out by another, larger dynasty so your children will at least have some money as they join the renting class.
“Helping my kids so much was a huge mistake”
For Mark Lacy, helping his two sons out since they graduated from high school has resulted in a $400,000 hole in his retirement funds.
The Seattle-based 65-year-old has supported his children, now both in their thirties, with expenses ranging from college tuition to plane tickets—deciding this year that the “Bank of Dad” had finally “gone out of business.”
“For some reason my generation has felt this great obligation to keep paying and allowing our children to avoid taking adult responsibility,” Lacy said. “I don’t know where it came from because our parents didn’t do that, to help our children avoid the reality of adult lives.
“I’m convinced that this weakens our culture and our economy by continuing to coddle adult children and not send them from the proverbial nest to take on that responsibility.” 
"The reason everything is expensive is because they are taking all the jobs and you kids don't want to work anymore!"
I am sympathetic to boomers struggling to afford to support their impoverished relatives
Not all of them are actually struggling financially as much as they don't want to support their impoverished relatives and would rather go on more cruises.
that's less sympathetic but it is also true that they did work all their lives and do deserve leisure in their old age. Old people are not the ones who screwed over the young as assuming they weren't a member of the political classes in America they like most people have lived their entire lives with no meaningful say over what policies are enacted so can't be held accountable for the results of the policies they didn't choose or supported based on having been given bad information
Boomers did not do this capitalists did
they did work all their lives and do deserve leisure in their old age
I'm not disagreeing here as much as I'm saying that as a political front, one that has more say in most western governments than younger people do, boomers are more than fine with kicking the ladders down and expecting people that came after them to do with less, to be effectively paid less, and to toil with less protections in place for when they are mistreated.
Boomers did not do this capitalists did
Many, many capitalists are boomers. There are more rich boomers still alive today by far than there are, say, millennials with that kind of money. Zuckerberg himself is a massive percentage of total millennial wealth alone.
Zuckerberg himself is a massive percentage of total millennial wealth alone.
Zuckerberg is more than half of all Millennial wealth and savings. If you remove Zuck from the statistics, the average net worth of a millennial is around negative $40,000.
I feel Zuckerberg is a great example of why looking at wealth generationally is nonsense. Are you richer because Zuckerberg is close to your age
I derive different conclusions from the same data. The fact that the wealth disparity (not just now, but when comparing people when they were the same age previously) is that much worse without Zuckerberg as a data point seems to speak against what you're apparently claiming about every generation through all of time having equal opportunities and equal difficulties.
I am not claiming they had the same opportunities than us I am claiming that them having things better than us economically and us having things worse off is the result of factors completely out of the control of most people of either generation and therefore not responsible and therefore not to blame
The thing that you're leaving out is the very real factor that boomer-brained people and capitalist society don't share the view that no ones responsible or to blame. And their conclusion is that their children are to blame for the world they actively benefited from and helped create. Not all boomer-aged people are equal in this equation (or younger groups), but boomer-brained people think the way they do because they benefited from that world order, they believe in that world order, and they gleefully clapped and supported the ladder being kicked away so their children couldn't climb it. Boomers don't need defending
is the result of factors completely out of the control of most people
Them being beneficiaries of a time of less severe internal contradictions of capitalism doesn't give them a free pass to be assholes and hypocritically lord it over other people that didn't get those same benefits when reaching the same age milestones.
"Blame" is meaningless after a while.
yeah I agree it is insufferable to have someone lecture you on success when they got their success due to relative luck.
It doesn't make sense to ascribe qualities like that to generational groups though as they aren't an institution that sets member policy they are a marketting demographic.
I think at this point you're accusing me of doing something I didn't actually do: I didn't say boomers caused these contradictions to worsen here as much as I dislike the double standard and the hypocrisy of the contemporary statements made by boomers (and boomer defenders) in the OP's link.
the news media finds the assholes in any demographic doesn't it. Millenials who are super into blockchain similarly get excessively platformed
news media finds the assholes in any demographic doesn't it
"Something happens everywhere" is not the same thing as "it happens in the exact same proportions everywhere and for all time."
it is pretty ridiculous to categorise wealth by generation as the children of these wealthy capitalists will inherit their money. Technically the young children of Prince William probably don't have many financial assets yet but it is ridiculous to not consider them wealthy.
boomers have limited say in reality and what tends to happen is the loudest and dumbest boomers get given artificial broadcast by news media owned by Rupert Murdoch in order to justify the thngs the government was going to do anyway because it makes friends of senators or ministers they went to harvard/cambridge with lots of money.
as the children of these wealthy capitalists will inherit their money
Demographically, at present, boomers as a generational force have held onto the reins of power for longer and have accumulated more wealth than their forebears per capita, and those that came after them have less money and less economic stability and especially less property to their name than boomers did when they were the same adult age. Also, for the first time in a long time, more recent generations are receiving less effective pay and poorer overall material experiences, including shorter life expectancy, something that has been unprecedented for at least a century.
EDIT: Adding some data, and it's from a mainstream
source that softballs the problem but still admits it's a problem.https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-versus-boomers-wealth-gap-2020-10?op=1
I am actually begging you to use class rather than generation as the basis for your analysis here. Boomers are not sharing that money evenly and have not worked together in a grand conspiracy to cause this result. This is the natural result of capitalism where wealth coaleses into few hands in larger volumes and productivity increases
also US boomers lived in a time where the economy was economically advantaged because every other major manufacturing economy had been severly set back by a major war that destroyed a lot of capital and infrastructure and took decades to recover from. America also insisted that the other allied powers of ww2 pay them exorbitant rates for their support in the war which further enriched America and impoverished its economic competition. It's called lend lease because they got the money back with interest. One of the major ladders that US boomers in particular had that no longer exists was Paris, Berlin, and London all effectively having been bombed to rubble
I am actually begging you to use class rather than generation
I am actually begging you to acknowledge that the internal contradictions of capitalism intensify over time, which means definitively boomers enjoyed a time when the contradictions were not quite so severe. Saying "everyone had it just as good and just as bad as everyone else through all of time" doesn't sound very Marxist to me. It just sounds like a defense of boomers through false equivalence.
I do not believe boomers caused these internal contradictions to intensify over time. US boomers happened to be lucky in being born in the only country to make money off of WW2 (other than Switzerland). Them having been born during a period of relative prosperity due to factors beyond their control and then having those factors go away also for reasons beyond their control just makes them lucky relative to other generations and yes it is insufferable to have someone who was merely lucky lecture you about how they got their success due to being smart. This good luck on their part is not however the cause of the bad luck on our part.
I think it's meaningless to demand one specific "cause" to an intersectional and complex series of material dialectics leading to the present moment. There are multiple causes, countless ones really. And boomers have benefited more from the same ongoing system (by and large because of the post WW2 economic benefits and the less-severe internal contradictions of the time) whether or not you insist that if they are innocent of "cause" then they must be categorically no better off than the generations getting pinched harder than they were at the same age.
no there were clearly several causes but you do seem to be angry at them and I do not believe it is just to be angry at someone for things beyond their control. It's false consciousness to blame the elderly who were less mistreated by the capitalists rather than the capitalists choosing to intensify the mistreatment.
Rather than boomers as a group deciding to force Amazon workers to have timed bathroom breaks it is specifically Jeff Bezos and the Amazon board of directors
but you do seem to be angry at them
I would like you to put away your metaphorical crystal ball and stop telling me how I feel, thank you.
I could just as easily quote you up there, and from posts before:
it is pretty ridiculous to categorise wealth by generation
I am actually begging you
And assume you are quite angry at me for even bringing up that far too many boomers lord their relative comforts and material advantages over younger people and pretend that the situation they faced is the same as those that came after them.
I'm not angry I am just concerned about the common false consciousness that harms organising that it is in fact boomers and not capitalists to blame which your arguments are at the very least adjacent to
I'm not angry
Neither was I, but I do dislike being told how I feel by someone because I happen to disagree with them.
common false consciousness that harms organising that it is in fact boomers and not capitalists to blame which your arguments are at the very least adjacent to
Dismissing or even insulting people for feeling trampled under capitalism with "actually" statements and telling them their anger is invalid is poisonous to agitation and organization efforts. I could say I am concerned about that in turn.
Let people be upset when assholes, including boomer assholes, tell them that they deserve to be poor and to suffer. The anger is legitimate if it is directed toward people posting trash like in the OP's link.
I said you seem angry I apologise if I misinterpreted your tone
You are angry at the wrong people and that is poisonous to solidarity it is legitimate anger at those people specifically but it is also important to recognise that those people are just a bunch of random assholes who cannot meaningfully be said to speak on behalf of anyone else
I said you seem angry I apologise if I misinterpreted your tone
You are angry
just a bunch of random assholes
They are not entirely random. They are prior beneficiaries of capitalism that are in higher economic rungs, and because they had better opportunities when they were younger than those that came after them when reaching the same age, they are now useful tools to capitalists to dunk on the rest of us, and anger toward that is legitimate.
telling them their anger is invalid
I from here assumed you were referng to yourself as a part of them and thus did consider your feelings to be anger
I am tired and after this comment will disengage
someday those wealthy boomers will die leaving their wealth to their children thus making millenials the wealthiest generation and you and I won't be a penny richer for it
Also when you remove billionaire outliers from their statistics, boomers in their 30s were on average wealthier than millennials are when you do include billionaires in our stats.
Numbers courtesy of the US Census bureau.
I think that person came into this thread already convinced that boomers needed defending, categorically, no matter what the material situation is between them and those that came in after them. The conclusion was already decided upon.
- Show
I swear, you have the best memory for posts on this site.
I don't have flawless recall, but I do tend to remember things, yeah. In fact I was just told:
someday those wealthy boomers will die leaving their wealth to their children thus making millenials the wealthiest generation and you and I won't be a penny richer for it
And I will certainly remember that in a few years when something that probably isn't that happens.
Cassandraism is a helluva drug.
EDIT: I feel flattered by that image edit and I may seize the memes of production if you're all right with that.
Truly the desire to be Cassandradamus is the downfall of our posters.
Please enjoy the meme.
This exactly. This is not an article about or for people who are actually struggling. Its about comfortable suburban freaks who like you say want more cruises. I think anyone would sympathise with older people who want to help and are struggling, but that's not this guy
I fully support boomer-age people that are comrades. Boomer is a state of mind, after all, and some "tradwife" obsessed young people want the boomer idea of society so badly that it'd be like Black Hole Sun music video LARPing.
Totally agree. Yeah boomer is refering to the boomer-brained not the boomer-aged. Its annoying how even on this site people will jump in to defend boomers as if they've ever needed defending
I'm not really a fan of generational warfare. I have meet amazing boomers
So have I.
Boomer is a state of mind, and some young people have fully embraced the
of it, especially "tradwife" obsessed reactionaries.That said, demographically speaking, a whole lot more boomer generation people had less severe internal contradictions to work with than those that came after them, and a lot of them punch downward at younger people that had to put up with worse at the same age.
Unfortunately, most of the survivors of the boomer generation are richer causing the
to be more likely to survive.Man, I never even made the connection that Fred Hampton was a boomer. I always just saw him as basically a brilliant kid who could have been out Lenin.
Im gonna focus on the "dont start with the numbers". Thats bullshit. The economic relationship is changing and trying to sell it as a social change only serves to fuck over the kid. Like most kids will have no insight into the state of their parents finances, whereas the parents will generally know how their kid is doing. If youre really struggling and need your kids help just show them the numbers.
They did set them up for failure, but not in the way they claim they did.
Who could've imagined that the generation most shaped by anti-communism and the cold war would create countries that are very hard to live in?
I don't really think it makes sense to blame boomers for the state of the world as I do not believe the American government would listen to them if they demanded it be better which indeed many of them did.
Capitalists made the world like this and most boomers had no more control over things when they were younger than we do now
I do not believe the American government would listen to them if they demanded it be better
Enough boomers demanded that covid restrictions, even the mild and weak ones put in place during
's administration, be done away with and made themselves heard quite loudly about that. And the government did listen to that.Well that's asking for something bad to happen and the US government is more willing to do bad than good things and it wasn't just them the lockdowns were costing a lot of important people a lot of money and it was really the private complaints of those very rich people that ended the lockdown the protestors were just a convenient excuse to look democratic and grassroots
How much money could these kids possibly save? Even if they had a job in a petit-bourgeois household, you're talking maybe 10K or something maybe? Also it reframes people being like "I can't afford to live on my own until at least 22" as "Gen Z wants to live at home until they're 22 or older now".
Man I got so fucked. My family just disintegrated when I turned 19 and my younger brother and me were just handed $700 for a security deposit on a slum while my mom eloped with her boyfriend to another state.
It's a legitimate miracle that the 2 of us were able to make it. Especially because everyone in the family saw us as "the lost causes" and basically removed losers who couldn't finish college (because we lost our home and father).
It took years before they'd even talk to us normally and not like we were a couple vagrant strangers.
Is kinda cathartic that now the two "alcoholic pillhead" brothers are doing better than their coddled Nazi children though.
I know a lot of boomers are probably gonna be really weird about this but i do honestly sympathise with them, because they are victims of modern economic policy as we are
Yep. Be told their whole life that this is the way to go, then watch it all crash down in their twilight years while being fed the most insane propaganda about why it's not the way it used to be can't be good for the brain.
No wonder so many of them want to believe
will announce a great debt jubilee any moment now and has "medbeds" ready to go to fix their health issues.
died young.
