Jeff Koterba, Omaha World Herald

Jeff Koterba, Omaha World Herald

Commentary: OK, boomer, we’re gonna socialize you

By Andreas Kluth

Bloomberg Opinion

Everything about SARS-CoV-2 seems unfair. It afflicts the poor worse than the rich, and Blacks more than Whites. It also disrupts — and potentially derails — the lives of people in some generations more than others. There’s social and political dynamite in this inequity. One likely effect is to make several developed countries swerve left politically, toward some bowdlerized form of “socialism.”




So it’s really the folks in their 20s and 30s, the generation between X and Z, we should spare a thought for. Logically, they should be called Generation Y, but because they came of age near a round-number year they’re the millennials. And boy, do they keep getting shafted.

It started with the financial crash of 2008, which hit just as the millennials were hoping to enter the job market and start their careers. Suddenly, all the good jobs were gone, and they were more likely to be and stay unemployed than the older generations.

Studies show that even a decade after the crash, all but the most educated millennials were earning and saving less than Xers or boomers did at the same age. Lower entry-level salaries can have consequences (“wage scars”) that last an entire life time. This precarious outlook is probably one reason why millennials had already been delaying marriage and children longer than preceding generations did, and are more likely to still be living with (gasp) their parents.

And then this coronavirus showed up, causing a downturn that’s making the “Great Recession” of 2008 seem almost mild. After that previous labor-market trauma, a lot of millennials took whatever gigs they could find — as bartenders, baristas, waiters or contract workers. But these are exactly the types of jobs that fell away during the lockdowns and may not come back soon.

So millennials have a right to be frustrated. But what makes many of them irate is watching the older generations milk the system at their expense, through what some economists call “boomer socialism.”

Consider the generous but unsustainable public pensions going to boomers in most developed countries, which are payed for largely by millennials and Xers. In the U.S., there’s also health care that’s universal and public for the old (called Medicare) but often unavailable or unaffordable for the young. In many countries, the boomers have also bid up house prices beyond the reach of millennials, in part with tax breaks for mortgage interest that disproportionately benefit older taxpayers. Oh, and there’s the mountain of student-loan debt bearing down on many American millennials.

This distress, coupled with the hypocrisy of boomers who claim to oppose big government while enjoying it in so many ways, explains why millennials have been trending left and even embracing the loaded word “socialism.” It’s these fed-up young voters who boosted the campaigns of lefty boomer populists like Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K.




It would be tragic if we survived the pandemic only to find ourselves living in true socialism, which in practice has always robbed societies of prosperity and individuals of freedom. To avoid that fate, all generations should offer millennials a fairer — a liberal — deal.
