Um yes. Labeling an entire group of real people “The Olds” because half of them didn’t vote the way you wanted them to is hurtful and disrespectful. And you know darn well, James, the number one reason millennials aren’t starting families is because we are in the midst of a spiritual crisis. You can blame all of this on their parents because they DIDN’T do their job and teach their children as they should have, and you’d be absolutely right, but the tone of this post, the conclusions, the lack of empathy or attempt to understand is so unlike you. I hope you live long enough to understand first hand because it WILL happen. Every generation is contemptuous and dismissive of the one or two generations before, so we will be on the receiving end of it someday, and unfortunately it seems to get worse with every generation so by the time our turn rolls around we’re really in for it.

Perhaps you’re tapped into different social science literature than I am, but all the empirical evidence I’m familiar with is unambiguous: student debt plays a significant role in causing Millennials to delay marriage, home purchases, and childbearing. The magnitude of the effect is still disputed, and it certainly isn’t the entire story, but it seems well-established that there is a significant effect. Here are some sources on this:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/consumer-community-context-201901.pdf

https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/69/30-69.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5231614/

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.718.4343&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://paa2010.princeton.edu/papers/101529

http://familyinamerica.org/journals/spring-2010/crushing-burden-student-loans-how-debt-weakens-family-formation-among-generation-x/

https://eric.ed.gov/?q=student+debt&pg=2&id=EJ1204454

This applies principally to wealthier Millennials, of course, since poorer Millennials tend not to carry student loan debt. This is why I regard student loan debt relief plans (like that of Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential candidates) with considerable suspicion; the moral hazard of bailouts aside, it looks an awful lot like vote-buying.

But I don’t think there’s a good empirical basis for denying that student loan debt has indeed contributed significantly to wealthier Millennials’ reluctance to start families or buy houses, just as I said in my post.

As for the rest, I’m very sorry to disappoint, but there’s nothing in my comment that I think is unfair or would describe as name-calling. (Is calling people between the ages of 40 and 73 “The Olds” name-calling, in your view?)

–James H.

To blame millennials’ reluctance to start families or buy houses on their student loan debt is so out of touch I’m literally wondering who has taken over your blog. The gross over generalizations, the lack of any responsibility whatsoever on any other generation, and the doubling down on the offensive name-calling … I just don’t even know how to process this from you.

There seems to be such a misunderstanding about who the Boomers are. I was born in 1954, right in the middle of this artificially designed group. My father was a veteran of the Korean War, not WWII. It was my parents’ generation who thrived as young adults in the post war economic boom – a boom created as the USA was the only functioning economy after the war and basically rebuilt the whole world. (I don’t think we want another world war to fix our economy)

My father (who is now 90) has been retired for 32 years and has been getting a >$2,000 per month pension for all this time in addition to his social security. I believe his generation is known as the Silent Generation. I, as a Baby Boomer, became an adult in the 1970s when the economy sucked. When we bought our first house, our mortgage interest rate was 15% . Do a little math to see how much house you could buy today if mortgage rates were 15%. Yet we still bought what little house we could because we wanted to be independent. We don’t have pensions like my father does. Our retirement is funded by our savings. The article makes a valid point that saving 15% of your income throughout your working life will fund your retirement. This was true for my “boomer” generation, and it should be true for millennials. Boomers who saved that 15% for forty years are now “rich” and millennials think we cheated somehow and messed things up for them. You will be rich too when you’re 65 if you minimize your debt and save for the future.

I have always felt that respect is earned, and the Boomer generation in particular has done everything it can to lose it.

As they enter their long twilight, we can look back on the political arc of Boomerism and recognize it for what it is: a legacy of selfishness, laziness, and myopia. They were amply warned, many times, on many issues, by many prophets, from Ross Perot to James Dobson. Like Israel before the Captivity, they refused to listen. Their legacy is a collection of policies that were, are, and will continue to be destructive for the rising generations, long after the Boomers themselves are dead. To take just the really obvious example, smart people have been ringing the alarm bell about our astonishing national debt for a lot longer than I’ve been alive, but Boomers voted repeatedly to take the money now (the tax cuts, the handouts, the vast mortgage subsidies) and leave their children and grandchildren with the bill.

“Our children will foot the bill” is such a hoary line now it’s a cliche, but what’s new is that those children and grandchildren are finally growing up, and they’re mad. All of them, rich and poor, watched the thriving youth employment market where Boomers cut their teeth implode like it was Ragnarok… and those jobs don’t seem to be coming back, ever. The wealthy young people are now saddled with exorbitant student loan debts (which are immune to ordinary bankruptcy procedures because reasons), which are causing them to delay family formation and home purchases. The poor ones are facing a shrinking social safety net as ever-more money is diverted to federal debt service. That’s going to get drastically worse in coming years, and The Olds form a large enough voting bloc to ensure that the money paying their debts won’t be coming out of their Medicare and Social Security. They’re going to kick the can down the road to you and me, because that’s all the Boomer generation has ever done in its entire political life.

And they don’t care. They have never cared. Unless and until the Youngs become a sufficiently unified and active voting bloc to fight back (and I’m by no means convinced this would be a good thing), the Boomers will never care. Some individuals do care, I know, and bless them for it. I have plenty of Boomer friends, mentors, and fellow travellers. But, collectively, the Boomers have refused to take responsibility for one single thing they has done to hurt this country. (And that list… brother, forget fiscal policy, let’s just talk about how much violence Boomers did to their own children with their culture of divorce.) Instead of admitting fault and trying to clean up their mess, they while their days away on Facebook sharing about how lazy Millennials are “killing brunch” and pull the lever for whichever politician vows to change everything except the policies that subsidize them.

The Boomers’ parents recovered from the Depression, built the social safety net (despite its many flaws), and then went off to fight World War II. They earned the name “Greatest Generation.” The Boomers themselves emptied the piggy bank on themselves, let their inheritance decay, shrugged at the post-apocalyptic landscape they left for their kids, and, in what must qualify as the quintessential paroxysm of Boomer politics, gave us a choice in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (It wasn’t the youth, in either party, that drove those candidates to the top!) Again, while I like and respect many individual Boomers, I think they will be remembered as a whole as the “Worst Generation,” and I think they will deserve it. I have resented their legacy since 2003 (I had an economic revelation in the sacristy one day after altar serving, as I guess one does), but the intervening 16 years have only deepened my opinion, and seen ever-more young people reach the same conclusion.

GenX… I don’t know. I honestly don’t know all that much about their history. It was unfair of me to lump them in with the rest of The Olds when the real object of my ire is those born 1944-1964. Sorry.

Thanks for reading the blog! I’m glad you think all those kind things about me. I hope this doesn’t ruin that opinion — but I gotta call the balls and strikes as I see them.

–James H.

Full disclosure: I am just barely outside the window of “millennial” but I guess I have respect beyond my generation.