Economic Policy: No, the Boomers Did Not Take It All

[Passages]

Why is The New York Times validating the generational myth, as opposed to taking a hard look at power and class?

by Robert Kuttner
October 21, 2025


Last week, The New York Times ran an op-ed under the bylines of Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum.Holzknecht is a producer with Times Opinion Video. Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for the Times editorial board. The piece, a highly produced video with a short introduction by the writers, is titled “How Boomers Blew Up the American Dream.”

The video is a collage of short comments by young Americans, strung together into a narrative storyline. The authors’ intro begins, “Hey, boomers! Younger Americans would like a word.” It concludes, “We have one simple request: How about an apology?”

The video collage, made up of several voices, begins:

Americans born in the decades after World War II were handed the world on a silver platter. Cheap college, cheap housing, abundant opportunity. The vast majority of you ended up wealthier than your parents, and Lord knows it wasn’t because you were smarter or worked harder. It was because America was an escalator. You just had to stand on it. You’ve been an electoral powerhouse since the ’80s. When presented with a choice between protecting your interests or investing in a better future for your children, you usually chose yourselves. More benefits for boomers, more tax cuts for boomers, and borrowed money to make up the difference … almost 30 trillion on the national credit card.

Nearly all of this is malarkey. It wasn’t “boomers” who destroyed the egalitarian postwar social contract. It was Ronald Reagan and the presidents who followed. Far from boomers cutting taxes for themselves and spiking the national debt, the reality is that taxes were cut mainly for the rich and the ratio of debt-to-GDP, which was over 120 percent of GDP at the end of World War II, came down to under 35 percent under Carter and then was pushed skyward again by Reagan. And the broad prosperity of the boomer era wasn’t just a matter of lucky generational timing. It was rooted in a different politics.

https://prospect.org/2025/10/21/no-boomers-did-not-take-it-all/

Malarky is too polite a word for it.

[spooky3]

1. Pitting generations against each other serves only the billionaires. Nt

[applegrove]

2. They are just trying to engineer more divisions between people.