When baby boomers entered the workforce, America handed them more than just jobs. It handed them an escalator—cheap college tuition, abundant housing, genuine upward mobility. The vast majority became wealthier than their parents. Not because they were smarter or worked harder, but because the system itself was designed to lift them up.
The problem is simple: they're still standing on it, and they've dismantled the stairs behind them.
The Electoral Powerhouse That Chose Itself
Since the 1980s, baby boomers have dominated American electoral politics. When faced with a choice between protecting their own interests or investing in a better future for their children, they chose themselves. Consistently.
The arithmetic of their priorities is stark. Over the past quarter century, they've accumulated nearly $30 trillion in national debt—money future generations will be forced to pay back. This wasn't an accident or an unavoidable consequence of governing. It was the result of deliberate choices: tax cuts for themselves, funded by borrowing on behalf of their children.
The Cost of Living in Their World
The numbers tell the story of betrayal through inflation. A year at a public university costs nearly four times what it did in 1970, adjusted for inflation. The median house price has more than doubled. For younger Americans trying to build a life, these aren't abstract statistics—they're barriers that didn't exist for their parents.
Boomers actively constructed these barriers. They wielded their electoral power to block new housing construction, protecting their property values while making it economically impossible for younger generations to live in cities with the best jobs. It's a form of democratic gatekeeping—using majority rule not to build something better, but to freeze their communities in time and defend their assets.
A Generation of Leaders, Same Generation of Priorities
For decades, America's leadership has been almost entirely boomer-led. Bill Clinton was the first boomer president. George W. Bush deepened the pattern. The current administration continues it—and hopefully, as the video suggests, will be the last.
The Bush years exemplified boomer priorities at the helm. In 2001, with government coffers full, boomers did what they'd always done: passed massive tax cuts to divide the money among themselves. They repeated the performance in 2003. Then in 2006, with the first boomer retirees entering the system, they voted to dramatically increase Medicare spending.
This isn't incompetence. It's a consistent pattern of leveraging power to extract wealth while future generations absorb the costs.
The Environmental Con
Perhaps nowhere is the gap between boomers' stated values and their actual legacy clearer than environmentalism. The generation that championed Earth Day and tree-hugging idealism created a planet that keeps getting hotter.
Instead of confronting the problem seriously—using fewer resources, fundamentally changing consumption patterns—they embraced recycling as a convenient fiction. Recycling allows people to feel like they're protecting the planet without doing anything genuinely difficult. It's a con game that has let boomers maintain their lifestyle while pretending to care.
Their waste got exported to poorer nations or dumped in the ocean. Today, there's a garbage patch three times the size of France swirling off the California coast. That's not an accident. That's a legacy.
The Debt They're Leaving Behind
Younger Americans don't live in segregated communities because of some historical accident. Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1968—a deliberate outcome of boomer-led policies prioritizing property values and exclusion over integration.
They don't sleep in cars because of bad luck. They sleep in cars because boomers used their electoral might to prevent affordable housing construction and because boomer-led presidents prioritized tax cuts over social investment.
They don't graduate into a world of opportunity. They graduate into a world crushed by student debt, where housing costs consume half their income, where the planet itself is visibly deteriorating.
What They Actually Got Right
This indictment isn't entirely without gratitude. Boomers did advance civil rights and gender equality in ways that created real progress. They gave the world good music, technological innovation, and the internet. These contributions matter.
But progress on social issues doesn't erase economic extraction. Musical innovation doesn't justify dumping waste in the ocean. The internet doesn't compensate for making homeownership impossible for the next generation.
The Ask
Younger Americans aren't asking for much: an apology. An acknowledgment that when given the choice between their comfort and their children's future, they chose themselves. An admission that they had advantages—that America was an escalator—and they made the decision to pull it up.
Maybe instead of writing clever protest signs about the state of the nation, it's time to write apology notes.