This book is shockingly eye opening. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to figure out what in the hell is going on in the US right now. The book was published in 2017 and I would love to see a newer analysis with the most recent political insanity included, though perhaps about 1 year in the future from now so we know a little most about how this evil will shake out. I made a TON on bookmarks on this. I think it's too many to include in a single review so I might paraphrase them. If you're looking for exact quotes or more detail, you should read the book. Everyone should read this book; it brings enlightenment to so many current issues! I'll start my paraphrasing now, in my own words: The most selfish generation ever to exist has done their damndest to pull the ladder up behind them every single step of the way. They hate their children. They hate their planet. And they probably hate themselves.
- "Rather it is the mass democratically sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and towards the boomers, the later having adjusted tax and fiscal policies to favor the accumulation of wealth during their lives at the expense of the future. A future whose course is of little concern because whatever failures it holds will be cushioned by the tens of trillions of entitlement dollars boomers will receive." We're not even out of the introduction yet before this book starts throwing punches. This section also draw attention to the difference between median income and mean income and how the big difference between those two numbers show significant problems rumbling through the economy.
- "TVs limits pose special problems when it comes to news programming." People who get most of their news from a tv get fewer facts at a slower pace than written news (nearly 1/3 of a news program is commercials, banter, junk, segues). People who are highly knowledgeable about current events or the mechanics of government are not people who get their news from the TV. I've had this argument with my own boomer father.
There's so much more I want to say (maybe I'll add it in later), but suffice to say, just read the dang book!
- "All of these factors, the shift to more progressive parenting, baby formula and television, had affects that manifested by the mid-1960's. Studies repeatedly show that more permissive parenting styles produce lower performance in schools, make children more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to exhibit problem behaviors. . . It is, perhaps not surprising that boomers' test scores started sliding. Before they were even adults, boomers were already failing. Constant SAT scores in both verbal and math categories slipped from 478 to 424 between 1964 and 1980, that is, when the boomers were taking these tests. Once the boomers graduated, test scores stabilized."
- "Northern Europeans have vastly more generous welfare states and higher personal savings rates. They understand that even in generous systems, individual responsibility remains paramount."
- "A key feature of boomer sociopathy is maximizing present consumption regardless of future costs. So reshaping the economy would be the focus of the revolutionary project. This proceeded under a set of theories, political and economic, now known as neoliberalism." Without going into the full description of neoliberalism, boomer neoliberalism is even more messed up because it's practically free-market a la carte, where they pick the benefits that they want and everyone/thing else can just implode on the market.
- "Nothing could be less helpful to the shortsighted glut of sociopathy than this explanatory system of evidence and causality, one that happened to undermine the deceit of which sociopaths are so fond. Vastly better suited to the sociopathic enterprise are feelings, guaranteed to align with the needs and desires of the moment because they supply them in the first place."
- "Many boomers dressed up indulgence as a moral crusade, just as they had with draft dodging, tax cuts, and their own military adventures."
- "The debt ceiling has been raised 16 times from 1997 - 2015, which makes it something like a diet where the number of permitted calories rises the fatter the dieter gets." You have only 1 guess as to which cohort was firmly in charge of the government during this period. I'm so disappointed thinking that for my generation, this kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road is now normalized.
- "The crisis was not so much acute, as ongoing, beginning with the SNL disaster of the mid-1980's and continuing with the LTCM emergency of 1998, the dot com crash of 2000 and the housing and financial panics of 2008, and yet, over years of boomer control, the response has always been the same: more deregulation, more spending, lower taxes, and no adequate structural reform during the windows of opportunity between scandals. Despite the quickening of crisis, nothing about boomer finance changed." Idiots, this is the definition of an idiot: doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.
- "As the boomers became Washington's most lethal invasive species, environmentalism waned."
- "The erosion of the church-state boundary has been another boomer era loss. A humanist republic must now endure the humiliation of watching boomer supplicants ... pay obeisance to a medieval theocrat as their counterparts busily misquote the bible. Jefferson would have thought the whole thing ridiculous while JFK would be astounded because his own election suffered from the perception that JFK would be obedient to papist idolatry at the expense of the protestant civic tradition."
- "During the 1950's, before boomers were old enough to exert political control or even participate in opinion surveys, polls showed overwhelming support for science and technology. . . When asked whether all things considered would you say that the world is better or worse off because of science, 83% of Americans answered better. The better percentage dropped to around 70% in the 1970's, which while still high in absolute terms, reflected a disturbing shift in attitudes. Notably, the percentage who believed that science had made things outright worse rose from 2% to 5-8%, low numbers to be sure, but alarming enough given their embrace of a view radically contradicted by the facts. These were sentiments one might expect from popes and younkers, not boomers swaddled in space-age prosperity. . . while the public displayed increasing skepticism for science's ability to solve society's problems." Remember that part above about using feelings to dictate government? Science doesn't care about your feelings, and that's why boomers hate is so much while they use it freely to keep being awful.
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