Warning! Extreme and excessive rant ahead. Apologies in advance to any noders of the baby boom generation. I'm probably not talking about you!
<rant>
Whereas the so-called "Greatest Generation" that survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, and built America into a superpower, their sons and daughters, the so-called "Baby Boomers" are the Worst Generation, and are destroying America.
Born between 1946 and 1964, the Baby Boomers are overwhelmingly white and have voted Republican in ever increasing percentages since they first swung Republican in the 1980 election that crowned Ronald Reagan their king. It was the Baby Boomers who gave us the cultural excesses of the late 1970s, the Baby Boomers who constituted the "Me Generation" in the 1980s when they started making real money, and the Baby Boomers who took the richest, most powerful nation since the Big Bang and drove it into the ground with their barely articulated ideology of all selfishness all the time, their massive borrow and spend proclivities, their refusal to provide any social services to brown people, and their hatred of ever paying any tax ever.
The main problem is that the baby boomers were born at the luckiest time and the luckiest place to be born in the history of mankind, and were handed all manner of opportunity and wealth on a silver platter, but here's the kicker - they think they earned it all. They think they worked hard, and in some cases they did, but for the most part they were given the most wealth for the least effort of any group of human beings before or since. So in response, they developed a bloated sense of entitlement that puts Marie Antoinette to shame.
This sense of entitlement was only further engorged by the refashioning of entire industries to suit each and every whim of this bulbous demographic excrescence; there was an explosion of products, TV shows, and advertising aimed at kids and teens in the 60s and 70s, advertisers raced to figure out how to market products to the middle-aged in the 90s, and in recent years sales of adult diapers have approached those of child diapers.
The result was an entire generation of spectacularly spoiled children, completely self-centered and utterly lacking in any sense of propriety or proportion. Just look at the current state of the US Congress, now that the last wizened yet wise elders of the Greatest Generation have finally bowed to time and fate and left the once august body in the hands of a generation of bombastic egomaniacs.
And now, in their twilight years, the Baby Boomers are driving America into permanent and unnecessary penury by preventing any and all reform of Social Security and Medicare at the very moment their massive numbers are clogging up the pipes and threatening to bring down the entire system, while they simultaneously vote for policies that will slash their own tax rates while cutting services for anyone who is young, poor, or non-white. It is no coincidence that the tax rates on investment income plunged in the 2000s, just as the Baby Boomers began to enter retirement and draw down their investments, and it is no surprise that in 2013, the US federal government spends only $1 on each citizen under 18 for every $8 it spends on each citizen over 65. We increasingly live in a gerontocracy.
Worst of all, whereas the Greatest Generation, forever haunted as they were by memories of the Great Depression, consistently voted for balanced budgets and raised taxes on themselves to pay for the wild military spending of the Cold War, the Baby Boom generation took the windfall of the end of the Cold War and the need for endless military outlays and squandered it on innumerable corporate welfare handouts and massive, unfunded tax cuts targeted narrowly upon themselves (tax cuts not offset by spending cuts simply being government spending by another name), all the while running up massive deficits whose burden will fall on their own children and grandchildren.
Sadly, the one admirable quality of the Baby Boom generation is their propensity to get themselves to the polls and vote, with voter participation in presidential elections among those over 65 topping 70 percent in recent years, whereas only 45 percent of those under 35 bother to make their voice heard. In other words, those of us younger than 45 or so will only recover control of our own future from the iron clutches of the Worst Generation when we pry America's purse strings from their cold, dead hands.
</rant>