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Thanks to baby boomers for depleting resources of this nation and now younger generations are stuck in this financial mess. Had they been more visionary with be

Thanks to baby boomers for depleting resources of this nation and now younger generations are stuck in this financial mess. Had they been more visionary with better overlook then today there would have been better opportunities for younger generation to earn and pay back those loans. https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millenn...

dnautics 9y ago
Let's not be too harsh on the baby boomers, they were trying to create a better world for the next generation, they chose chose to do it via an unsustainable system that relies on top-down direction of the economy using inappropriate tools. Can you blame them for that? Top down worked great at things like rebuilding europe after a war (admittedly an eminently unfalsifiable task)... True, there were minority voices clamoring that this would result in ruin, but to be fair there are still well regarded "smart" people who argue that the problem for millennials is that those people in charge just didn't do it ENOUGH.
- marshray 9y ago
  > they were trying to create a better world for the next generation I don't see a lot of evidence for this, except perhaps Reagan's program of deficit spending on an arms race to bankrupt the 'evil empire'. Maybe people should be forgiven for believing in the trickle-down lie once, but it's now simply a transfer of wealth scam.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Well the current neoliberal program of low or negative interest rates to stimulate economic growth and 'reinvestment' is basically trickle-down, too, just in a less direct fashion plus actively impoverishing the poor (instead of merely taking less from the rich). So it's basically still believed - just as a more obfuscated scam.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Baby boomers were kind of stuck with a pretty rough demographic problem. Workers-per-retiree is an incredibly important number, and it's been dropping steadily due to declining birth rates and extended longevity in the West. And roughly speaking, there are two ways society can turn current productivity into future support for retirees. The first is to forgo consumption of current production in exchange for a promise of future consumption of others production - this can either be implicit through a tax-and-distribute scheme, or directly implemented through debt. Retirement saving in general is the latter, and increased savings rate leads to savings gluts which cause cheap debt which forces the price of debt-financed goods up to make the market clear. This, in short, is why college is so expensive: every creditor needs to find a debtor, and Grandma bought up fixed-income products. The second way to use current production is to leave easy-to-collect natural resources like oil in the ground, use current productivity to fund current consumption instead, and collect those resources later. Everything else is impractical on a society-wide scale.

dnautics 9y ago

Let's not be too harsh on the baby boomers, they were trying to create a better world for the next generation, they chose chose to do it via an unsustainable system that relies on top-down direction of the economy using inappropriate tools. Can you blame them for that? Top down worked great at things like rebuilding europe after a war (admittedly an eminently unfalsifiable task)... True, there were minority voices clamoring that this would result in ruin, but to be fair there are still well regarded "smart" people who argue that the problem for millennials is that those people in charge just didn't do it ENOUGH.

marshray 9y ago
> they were trying to create a better world for the next generation I don't see a lot of evidence for this, except perhaps Reagan's program of deficit spending on an arms race to bankrupt the 'evil empire'. Maybe people should be forgiven for believing in the trickle-down lie once, but it's now simply a transfer of wealth scam.
- dnautics 9y ago
  Well the current neoliberal program of low or negative interest rates to stimulate economic growth and 'reinvestment' is basically trickle-down, too, just in a less direct fashion plus actively impoverishing the poor (instead of merely taking less from the rich). So it's basically still believed - just as a more obfuscated scam.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

Baby boomers were kind of stuck with a pretty rough demographic problem. Workers-per-retiree is an incredibly important number, and it's been dropping steadily due to declining birth rates and extended longevity in the West. And roughly speaking, there are two ways society can turn current productivity into future support for retirees. The first is to forgo consumption of current production in exchange for a promise of future consumption of others production - this can either be implicit through a tax-and-distribute scheme, or directly implemented through debt. Retirement saving in general is the latter, and increased savings rate leads to savings gluts which cause cheap debt which forces the price of debt-financed goods up to make the market clear. This, in short, is why college is so expensive: every creditor needs to find a debtor, and Grandma bought up fixed-income products. The second way to use current production is to leave easy-to-collect natural resources like oil in the ground, use current productivity to fund current consumption instead, and collect those resources later. Everything else is impractical on a society-wide scale.