The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.
But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.
Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.
Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
Okay, stirrings. Maybe I have a blind spot on this, but…
“The Baby Boomers ruined America.”
I reject this charge, along with any reference to The Constitution that does not qualify where it ran over our Bill of Rights, where it attempted to reduce us to subjects.
There are many definitions for the word “subject,” but the two that jump out at me are:
1) a citizen or member of a state other than its supreme ruler
and
2) under the authority of
Origin: middle English: owing obedience. From the Latin, subjectus: brought under, past participle of subicere: throw under
Pretty heavy word-play. One understands why Henry, time-after-time, affirms he is not a SUBJECT.
And how about the words “supreme ruler?” Are they not enough to produce a heart-attack, or just plain, ole’ rage?
The author wants to pin this on the aging, even blaming our aging. Then we’re hit with more blame: We “made American institutions less dynamic.” Uh, could this possibly have anything to do with the communistic perversion we’ve been slimed with for many decades, or with the corporatizing of all things national belonging to the people? And WE are blamed for leaving a crisis for younger Americans. We’re even blamed for them not having affordable housing and for the “required licensing and degrees for everything” debacle. Author has head in sand, no? Not one glance at government. At war machine. At resource theft of American Nationals. Not one glance at Jewish power, central banks, infiltration, hijacking and occupying of the country. But this article is in The Atlantic – hard to get more mainstream than that.
We’re cited for the “incredible rise in incarceration rates.” Police state be damned. It’s hippies and home-schoolers who are to blame. And now that they/we are getting older, we are burdening the state with the cost. So here it comes, the grand solution: “higher taxes!!”
I’ll just close by saying, Mr. Stone, get a clue what your government has become and what it’s inflicted on its people. Boomers may not be entirely blameless, surely some of us allowed what happened to happen, but in no way do we carry the lion’s share of the blame in terms of the state of our country and the legacy to younger generations. Please study Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, for starters. You may find yourself running to a few boomers and asking, “What do we do? How do we stop them from turning us all into slaves?” Smart boomers will refer you to The Bill of Rights and The Common Law, and to a little ole’ website called From The Trenches. You will learn where blame should mostly and rightfully be placed.
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Totally nailed it Galen, Mr Lyman Stone is a pure idiot who cannot see the forest for the trees.
This guy is nothing more than a zionist shill trying to make us look down and never up.
The baby boomers were the largest generation, that means we are the largest to ever retire, and that also means we paid in the most.
They hate our f-king guts, make no mistake about it, but it has nothing to do with anything except the fact that we were the last to know enough freedom and liberty to know what those ideals feel like, hence we will be the first to blow their f-king asses away as they try to subjugate us.
F-k this punk. As far as the baby boomers hurting housing, we did not reproduce our numbers so that would allow for more for our progeny. The ones displacing our children and grandchildren are the invaders from around the world being brought in, using our resources to take everything that we were to leave to our children.
Don’t even listen to these pricks, just keep your rifle clean and your powder dry and make sure you have plenty of food and it will be a pleasure blasting these communist mother f-kers out of our country to fight and die knowing that we will be leaving our progeny the paradise that should have been ours if not for the zionist jew international corporate mafia and the negligent self-serving generations before us.
“…we were the last to know enough freedom and liberty to know what those ideals feel like”
Painful words to hear. Profoundly true.
But…
“…hence we will be the first to blow their f-king asses away as they try to subjugate us.”
Out of pain, strength. Out of capture, courage. Out of loss, victory!!
Glass half full.
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I was flabbergasted when I read the article and that’s why I sent it in to post…..I was so taken aback at the bee ess this guy was putting out I could not find words ….however all of you above did a very fine job 🙂
I don’t think I agree with the title
I think it should be
This illegitimate government ruined everything
Redirection
And blame the other guy game
Not playing
“The Boomers Ruined Everything”
ONLY THE KIKE ONES DID THERE LEROY. GIT YER DAMN FACTS STR8
Speaking of boomers, and our time… Was Dylan playin’ us?:
Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues:
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCcnJ5kbFMg
Lyrics:
Well, I was feelin’ low down and blue
I didn’t know what in the world I was gonna do
Them Communists they were comin’ around
They were in the air
They were all over the ground
They wouldn’t gimme no peace
Well I run down most hurriedly
And joined the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started walkin’ off down the road
Oh boy, I’m a real John Bircher now
Look out you Commies
Now we all agree with Hitlers’ views
Although he killed six million Jews
It don’t matter too much that he was a Fascist
At least you can’t say he was a Communist
That’s to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria
Well, I was lookin’ everywhere for them Reds
I got up in the mornin’ ‘n’ looked under my bed
Looked in the stove, behind the door
Looked in the glove compartment of my car
Couldn’t find ’em
Well I looked underneath everything, behind a chair,
Lookin’ for them Reds everywhere
I even looked up my chimney-hole
Looked down deep inside my toilet bowl
They got away
Well, I was home alone, I started to sweat
I figured they was inside my T.V. set
Peeked behind the picture frame
Got a shock from my feet right up to my brain
Them Reds caused it
I know they did, them hard-core ones
Well, I quit my job so I could work all alone
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they was red stripes on the American flag
Ol’ Betsy Ross
I investigated all the books in the library
Ninety percent of those gotta be thrown away
I investigated all the people that I knowed
Ninety-eight percent of them have gotta go
The other two percent are fellow-Birchers, just like me
Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy
Roosevelt, Lincoln and that Jefferson guy
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell
I know for a fact he hates Commies ’cause
he picketed the movie Exodus
Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outta things to investigate
Couldn’t imagine anything else
So now you find me at home investigatin’ myself
Hope I don’t find out nothin’
Good God
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🙂
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