It’s All the Boomers’ Fault!

I found Jonathan Russo’s proposal at The Hill for dealing with the federal debt by imposing a wealth tax on members of the Baby Boom generation interesting:

To avoid shackling the post-Boomer generations with the onerous task of paying off the national debt, the Boomers’ wealth needs to be on the table.

In his book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” Bruce Gibney argued that “generational plunder” was their economic legacy. Through tax cuts and deficit financing of several wars, the Boomers left America in shock. “Plunder” is a strong word. In the corporate legal world, it is enough to justify a clawback of the plunderers’ assets.

That the rich and powerful owe something to the government that gave them the ability to amass so much wealth is not unheard of. The group Patriotic Millionaires and its most visible member, Abigail Disney, argue that they themselves should pay more in taxes. They claim that American tax codes are riddled with loopholes that often make the rich pay lower average rates than working people — something Warren Buffet has spoken about for years and which was recently brought up in President Biden’s State of the Union speech.

I was unaware that the Baby Boomers had been conspiring to enrich themselves at the expense of the generations that preceded them and follow them. Or that they had used their control of the legislative and executive branches of government to do it.

As it turns out there has never been a time during which the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the president were all Baby Boomers. Such a time may never come. Furthermore, the author is looking at a snapshot of national wealth when he should be looking at a movie. Courtesy of Statista here is a graph illustrating the distribution of wealth by age cohort over time:

Find more statistics at Statista
As you can see the Baby Boomers’ holding of the majority of national wealth didn’t start until 2005 and it’s already beginning to decline. Meanwhile the Silent Generation held the majority of national wealth for a full fifteen years (at least)—you can’t actually tell how long due to the limitations of the graph. Most of the debt has been racked up by the Silent Generation.

Shorter: as Willie Sutton put it he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Don’t worry. The Baby Boomers won’t have their wealth for long.