throw-234

> You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000.

from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/18/national-...

> Greene desires something that has long been forecast but that has not happened: “more generational conflict.” However, “the boomers are organized,” and there has not been “a broader political awakening among younger generations.” So, boomers are serenely unthreatened as some of their households receive almost $117,000 annually from Social Security, and some Medicare programs cover “golf balls, greens fees, social clubs, ski trips, and horseback riding.”

Indeed, so serenely unthreatened that they are very actively threatening to everyone else. These are the same people that are forever using hunger as a bargaining chip with snap, school lunches, and policing what other people can and cannot get.

> The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"

The attitude is just that they were the primary beneficiaries of the spending. They presided over the debt growth to ~40 trillion and if they did not approve they also did not stop it. They still will not let anyone else stop it! If the generational conflict were literally a war with a truce, one might expect significant reparations, or at least acknowledgement and apology? Far from it. Older folks gouged out 10x profit selling crappy houses, and while young people are delaying life milestones for decades to try to buy that house, boomer landlords charged them rent to stay at their third investment property and mocked legitimate hardship with latte and avocado toast bullshit.

For whoever needs to hear this, that 'ok boomer' reply feels less and less adequate. It's actually deadly serious and a very bloody business to just doom millions of people. Data will be clear about this one day and you already see all the trends.. deaths of despair up, life expectancy down, births down, conflict up, climate crisis closer, all with zero resources to pick up the slack. Boomers have even begun destroying international standing and friendships that might have helped us negotiate the national debt situation later. While they're working to pull the ladder up for the improvements they made to civil liberties and women's lib. On the whole they'll have lived longer, happier lives in better conditions than their kids, and they did it by stealing the future.

> everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.

That's exactly what I'm getting it. Again not so much for you but for whoever needs to hear it.. Prospects on HN are better than average, ok? And Gen-Z looks to be childless, which may be painful, but is rational and avoids drama. Listening to average Gen-X / Millennials though.. many obviously don't plan to be old. They know they can't afford to be old. So they are taking care of their elders, they are taking care of their kids, and when that tapers off they're planning to just die quickly themselves if/when they get sick. The worst nightmare of what must never happen to the elderly in civilized society is just another awkward future that boomers may have already caused and will not have to face, but posterity will.

Hope this helps someone, really. Boomers need to be able to hear it. This is a bit like being an American abroad.. you expect to be a bit of punching bag on occasion. It doesn't actually matter if you're personally complicit, you kind of need to acknowledge you're a member of a group that has been up to no good. It's not a shame ritual, or bitter ranting, or just provocative. It's a calculated test that's probing for ignorance or understanding, character, empathy, and solidarity. Most boomers don't pass, and don't pass, and don't pass, and make things worse. => End of patience, end of cordial relations, end of respect, end of trust, end of relationships.

> Sounds dramatic, but what are we talking about here?

How about this? https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4633773-eat-the-boomers-...

> 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.

IMHO if we don't use it to settle the debt, it won't be inherited by people anyway, it will simply be deleted during end-of-life care, where the oldest boomers pay the youngest boomers that are still in charge of whatever insane private-equity healthcare mess we land on, thus making the "greatest generational transfer of wealth" directly to the 1%.

>It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...

Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?

> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.

Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.

> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.

You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?

> Is ageism not like racism, sexism, etc.?

First, young people didn't choose this. It's been coming from the other direction and out in the open for a very long time. Why not make it official that it's mutual? Past time this was acknowledged, expected, and planned for. Second, I don't dislike all old people in all cultures or anything like that. We're talking about a specific cohort that shares the same experiences and most of the same perspectives. This isn't about who they are anyway, or about what they are like in some abstract sense. It's about what they've done as group and continue to do.

Boomers wrecked the veritable paradise that their own parents built with unforced errors and some combination of greed, stupidity, and malice. Then they blew up the lives of their children, and have moved on towards wrecking the rest of the country and indeed the whole world as much as possible before they check out. They did that, not some impersonal forces of history.

America IS boomers. That's the whole point of the article. Are things going well? America may not actually survive boomers. There's no point in a long list of their crimes, it's in TFA too, and everyone knows the inheritance. Housing crisis, national debt, and climate change alone would be a crippling blow for posterity, but now that's just a few of the disasters ahead, and we're in a much worse position to meet any of it. The first generation that was actually selfish and stupid enough to piss away so much prosperity that they've very likely ruined things for several generations. Boomers can't even disagree with this, because who would they blame? They'd have to sit down, shut up, and let someone else steer.

> You're overlooking that the geriatric people are carrying on the traditional liberal/conservative debate on both sides of the aisle.

Workers skew young, capital skews old. When politics is money literally the only thing the left / right actually agree on is fucking over young people. That's what it takes to collectively focus on inflating real-estate / stocks that the youth is locked out of, while ignoring the labor market, and the cost of education, and periodically blowing up the economy on behalf of interest groups, with outsourcing or the like previously, next with AI. We've probably been in a job recession for years, and we only just noticed.

> They have three new or late-model vehicles.

Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.

Ah yes, the squeeze in the middle. My default assumption is that people outside ~35-45 range are often impatient to the point that they are, for practical purposes, functionally illiterate

Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!

You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.

> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son

We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.