Boomers can save what’s left of America for younger generations

By Joy Pullmann | The Federalist

This is an extended version of a speech given to Eagle Forum’s national conference last week.

Are millennials and Gen Z better off than their parents?

In their childbearing and prime income years, boomers were born into a more unified culture, with much less competition from foreign markets and migrants, far more plentiful family-wage-earning jobs that didn’t require college degrees, far cheaper college for the minority suited for it, far lower inflation for core survival costs, stronger families with less divorce and working mothers, less crime, higher church attendance, higher rates of volunteering for everything from PTA to Little League, fewer cross-country moves from family to obtain a job, more cultural cohesion, and less-woke public schools where students spoke English.

Boomers did not deserve any of those things because of merit; these are a gifted civilizational inheritance that helped them succeed. Yet, as a generation, boomers have passed down none of this to their children and grandchildren.

The boomers grew up in a completely different world than their children and grandchildren live in today. They need to know that and respond. It is an abdication of duty to spend 20, 30 retirement years consuming pleasures rather than leaving an eternal legacy for the people God placed you near.

Boomers are the richest generation in world history, but their children are the most bankrupt, both financially and culturally. The shocking financial realities we’ll look at in a moment are a symbol of the last century’s private equity-style, vulture-capitalism treatment of Americans’ priceless civic inheritance.

The Legacy Window Is Closing

My most recent book, False Flag, argues that family disintegration is a root cause of America’s political and cultural disintegration. Family disintegration is also the root cause of the wealth gap between young and old Americans that is setting us up for crazier politics. You think the Trump era has been crazy? Buckle your seatbelts.

Part of that craziness will come from the steadiness and civic trust we will lose when boomers head — hopefully — to heaven. While millennials and zoomers might rudely trash boomers in public, their deaths will be a huge loss for our country. Boomers are generous with their time and money, patriotic, and better educated than their kids. They have priceless practical knowledge about how to keep engines running, farms producing, and factories operating.

But their window to shape their legacy is closing. Before they go, we younger folks need our grandparents to build and fill supply lines to sustain the ways of life necessary to win a long march of reconquest back through America’s institutions. We need the richest generation in world history to offset the malevolent influences of billionaires like George Soros. And we don’t just need boomers’ money; we need them to teach us by example that some things matter far more than money.

The Economic Despair Spiral

Napoleon Bonaparte famously said that an army marches on its stomach. People worried about affording the medical bills if their kid breaks an arm aren’t persuaded by slogans about the evils of socialism. The right needs to make people’s everyday lives better. The investor Peter Thiel notes, “If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.” Shortly you’ll see why I don’t think we have a capitalist system, but his point remains: People are not likely to support a society in which their futures look worse than their parents’.

You see, the Cold War didn’t fully end. It was imported into American schools, workforces, and media. So, paradoxically, the young have been taught to blame capitalism for the consequences of socialism. The distress young Americans feel, combined with their public school-induced ignorance about Christianity, history, and economics, opens their souls to communism.

A poll out this month found 59 percent of Democrat Party voters support the Democrat Socialists of America, which is just a communist front group, with more than 25 percent of all voters supporting the group.

Communists and socialists agree socialism is merely the preface to communism. The world’s leading Communist country, China, blends communist, socialist, and fascist methods — it widely deploys covert party organizations barely disguised as independent entities. So I divide the world into collectivism and ordered liberty. The United States is now a mix of these, and our bureaucracy has been on a merger path with Communist China, as writer N.S. Lyons argues.

Russ Greene points out that Communist China redistributes less wealththan the United States does. The United States also spends more on redistribution than Canada, and about as much as France, Sweden, and Germany. So if Germany and France are socialist welfare states, what is the United States?

Government debt and deficits from old-age entitlements that the elderly did not earn are causing structural inflation that keeps the young from forming families. Further, the young have not been trained in the virtues necessary to deal with even small hardships. This creates a situation ripe for revolutionary politics and leftist extremism.

While luxuries and tech have gotten cheaper since boomers were young, the price of a middle-class life has skyrocketed: mortgages, rent, college, health insurance, food, and energy. Even things that have gotten cheaper, like new cars and clothing, have cratered in quality. Consumer goods, for example, wear faster and look cheaper, are harder to fix yourself, and can rarely be passed down.

Moreover, cheap screens are creating the dumbest generation in recorded modern history. 

Working So Other People Can Relax

These next graphs show that all the core living expenses, in inflation-adjusted dollars, have increased by huge amounts, taking people’s previous budget margins and keeping more Americans out of the middle-class status that promotes social stability. 

Here’s a personal example. In our 17 years of marriage, my family’s medical expenses have always been below our deductible (except for the year a kid broke his arm jumping off a playhouse roof). The cost of employer-provided insurance minus those expenses works out to paying $375,000 entirely for other people’s health care, while also paying for nearly all of our own medical expenses. Thanks, Obamacare!

Imagine if we’d been able to invest that money in a house, or retirement or college fund — we’d have about $1.4 million, enough to retire right now! Instead, our government steals our work for other people through hidden taxes like coverage mandates. This is indentured servitude, and it depresses work ethic. So you can see why the gap between the young and old has grown so much — the young pay for far more expenses we can’t get out of than our parents did at our ages.

Most of what today’s young people pay for, both directly and indirectly, are subsidies to the richest generation through Social Security and Medicare. And it’s still not enough. Young people are paying twice as much in taxes to fund Social Security and Medicare as their parents did, and still all those only fund half the costs of Medicare, the most broke of the two entitlements destroying our economy.

These programs now cost so much they are three-quarters of federal spending, more than a quarter of which is now funded by debt (and set to explode further soon).

These two are 95 percent of our nation’s unfunded obligations — the difference between the workers we have to tax and the people expecting to get those workers’ money.

Entitlements Cause Unavoidable Inflation

The truth is, Social Security recipients are getting much more than they paid in. Despite what some may say to make themselves feel better, these programs are straight-up welfare. There’s no way around that fact.

Even if President Trump somehow guts all the fraud in these programs, these realities would remain. In fact, if American retirees only got out of Social Security what they paid in, it would become solvent. Other less painful ways to address this situation would be 1) capping the health expenses people can charge to taxpayers, just like insurance does, and 2) only giving Social Security to those who need it, not those with sufficient retirement wealth.

Do you think boomers would vote for these? They should. The alternative is state-sponsored euthanasia that kills even people who don’t want a lethal injection, which is growing everywhere leftists control healthcare. My point is truly not to bash boomers here, but to open their ears to the young’s complaints.

Now, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has explained, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” This means inflation happens when governments spend more than they tax. Their only honest options for fixing this are raising taxes or cutting spending. The third, dishonest, option is printing money. That is already happening, and the size of this debt bomb is why it’s going to continue.

In fact, we’re facing a spiral in which entitlement-caused inflation pushes interest rates higher, which makes entitlement-fueled debt more expensive, and repeat. If interest rates stay where they are right now, within a decade interest on the federal debt will cost more than Medicare and Social Security. 

The only good thing about this situation is that young people mostly don’t know how it works. They just see that boomers eat out often while they can’t afford to anymore, get free health care while we have to have a second income just to pay premiums, and own large homes in safe neighborhoods that we can’t afford. On top of all that, in many states boomers are now insisting they be exempt from property taxes while still expecting an ambulance to come when they call.

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