From a retired worker, after decades of work: you’re a flaming asshole. You, too, will get old. You will need - and will deserve - to spend your older years living with dignity, and with healthcare. Not “access to healthcare.” And all of this is more than possible. This country pisses away over a trillion dollars a year on war. Our private medical system saddles us with the highest cost for piss-poor results, especially when compared to other advanced countries and even many lower income nations. Wealth inequality is reaching Gilded Age levels. The ability to pay for secure retirements and national health care (for all ages, you twit) is there: just look at the insane billions in the hands of a tiny sliver of the population. And even with your brief hat tip toward leftists who have struggled for these things, you wind up doing the bidding of the 0.1%, pretending this is a generational rip off perpetrated by “Boomers” and not by the capitalist class. Extract head from ass, and figure out who has benefited in the past three or four decades, and aim your fire accordingly. Sheesh!
This made me laugh out loud - your comment, not the subject matter of the piece. I’m a boomer in my 70s and have never stopped working, at least part time. Still working, partly to provide for my children who will not have the safety net we boomers have been afforded. There is a lot of truth in this post and much of it is eye-opening.
You insist on blaming us "the Boomers" as if - as a GENERATION - we are responsible for the ripoff perpetrated by a CLASS. Once again: get your head out of your ass, and stop blaming working people for the actions of the capitalists. Our society is perfectly capable of feeding, housing, providing medical care and comfortable retirements, to all of us. It's a matter of wealth distribution, and how that wealth is put to use. I could easily rant against my parent's generation, pre-Boomers, who were able to buy houses for $35,000 that now go for way north of a million. But it wasn't my parent's fault, or the fault of their generation. Financialization of everything, increased privatization of what should be in the public sphere, and the shifting of societal wealth more and more into the hands of a tiny few, did this. Blaming an undifferentiated generation is not just lazy, it's to actively ignore and deny the class nature of society.
Just to expand on the information provided in your reply:
Since 1973 (ancient history to most, and of seemingly no relevance) income inequality has increased to the point where it is now.
Most would find it difficult to comprehend the tax rate for the wealthy was 92%, until it was lowered - to 91%. A tax rate the wealthy agreed to, btw.
Reducing the tax rate on the wealthy along with moving manufacturing offshore did a number of things - it wiped out jobs that made real tangible things, destroyed unions, ravaged the middle class, decimated small business, promoted monopolies, and privatized just about every social support mechanism the New Deal introduced to eliminate needless suffering and poverty.
Equalization starts by taxing the rich - again - and purging society of the parasitic financialization actions of the rentier class.
Otherwise, the hardships endured by the working class prior in the early 1900s will become the fate of our children and grandchildren - starting with the tragedy of child labour, for one, the degradation of education next, and the continued financialization of everything.
That is the final solution.
It’s got nothing to do with generational differences - just ignorance of what happened before rather than being terrified of what lay ahead.
I’m not ignoring the class based nature of society and agree with your points. However, i can still recognize that your generation, as a whole, has severely damaged the country. Your parent’s generation bequeathed their children a wealthy, industrialized superpower, with a highly effectual and envied system of government. And the boomers, collectively, pissed that all away for short term financial gain. Not to mention the idiotic culture wars.
Anyway, enjoy your retirement and social security checks, I’m so happy to pay for my parents generation to chill at home and vote MAGA.
Christopher: you obstinately insist on blaming an undifferentiated generation for the actions of the ruling class. This is not just wrong, but it makes for very, very stupid politics. There's a sliver of YOUR generation that wants to shred the remnants of the social gains we still have. Should we blame your entire generation for the tech bros? You come across as wanting to rip away from the retired and the elderly the social support on which we depend, rather than seeking to organize across generations to ensure that your generation is able to receive these benefits, and MORE! The idea is to level UP, not to tear down.
The "Boomers" did not "collectively" piss away the "wealthy, industrialized superpower." It took an organized working class in the 1930's and later to win Social Security, Medicare. It also took the existence of post-capitalist societies elsewhere in the world to put the fear of working class revolt into the hearts of the ruling class, thus encouraging them to share a few crumbs of the massive wealth we create. But they never intended for that to happen, and first chance they got, they've moved to cut it all back. The attacks on Social Security were there from the very beginning, and for some insane reason, you echo those attacks! If you want your generation to have health care, secure retirement, affordable housing, good public education, you need to organize and fight for it. You'll find plenty of Boomers joining you in solidarity. But don't piss on our leg and tell us it's raining!
so you’re one of those boomers. got it. the money and the healthcare and any other socialist benefits the US govt gets are not on the table for us plebians.
Please explain your comment. It reads to me like you have simply swallowed the ruling class propaganda that ANYthing that actually benefits the working citizenry of the country is "unaffordable." The rich bastards didn't give us any of this without a fight. It will take struggle (strikes, political organizing) to maintain and expand those gains. At a time of gross wealth inequality, trillion dollar war budgets, privatization of health care, education, even such simple things as the parking meters (see Chicago), the idea that we don't have the resources or ability to provide a decent old age and health care for all, is simply preposterous. You have given up without even trying! This is NOT a generational battle. There are asshole squillionaires in your generation intent on taking us back to the 1890's. You gonna put up with that?
you don’t understand how there’s no benefits left because yall are actively voting to strip them away? you don’t understand how the US govt has socialist healthcare and unlimited pto while no one else does? do you live under a rock or are you just ignoring it?
there’s definitely no squillionaires in my generation. that would require yours to stop hoarding more wealth than they can spend, and more houses than they can live in. i have not given up, but i’m also logical. i can see how screwed we are given the choices your generation made. it must be nice to be the only group to receive all the socialist benefits that are being decimated by the boomers in office. that must be my generations fault too though. since yall can’t take any accountability.
Lea, in what universe do you live? The Unites States most definitely DOES NOT have "socialist healthcare." We have the most expensive health care non-system in the advanced capitalist countries, providing much worse outcomes at much higher cost. Unlimited paid time off? For whom? Where? What are you smoking? Again, quit blaming a generation for the actions of a CLASS (which extends across generations.) The way you talk, you'd claim the average wealth of a baseball stadium's worth of people suddenly soared, because Bill Gates walked in. Technically true, but utterly ridiculous as a method of analysis of wealth inequality. Wages in this country have been basically stuck since the 1970's. Working people have been struggling to hold on to the gains we made through union organizing in the 1930's and in the first decade or two after WWII, when the rest of the world was in ruins and the US stood bestride the world. But we never made the necessary step to break politically with the two capitalist parties, one of the major reasons we never achieved universal health care, or national retirement beyond basically a subsistence level (you try living on Social Security alone: you will quickly discard the illusion that the millions of elderly trying to scrape by on it are the cause of your distress.) In my working life (decades in a factory environment, the last 35 fortunately unionized) I was on strike five times, almost always to preserve health care coverage, something that shouldn't have been a subject of union/employer bargaining in the first place if we actually had the socialist healthcare of which you speak. Seriously: where are you getting your vision of class relations in this country? It is not in accord with reality.
wow you can’t read for shit apparently my dude. go back and read what i wrote. i quite literally said WE don’t, but a small group (elected officials) have borderline socialist healthcare and PTO benefits that would rival europe. so you’re not paying attention AND you can’t be bothered to read either. you have so much to say, but you can’t be bothered to actually read AND UNDERSTAND what others are saying before you start spewing fucking garbage about how i’m wrong, but you don’t even know what i said 😂 you quite literally flipped my entire point because you lack basic reading comprehension. talking to you is like talking to a brick wall. seriously where are you getting your vision of what i actually said? it’s not according to reality.
your strikes didn’t do anything, this country is still shit. and it is quite literally the previous generations fault. how can it be our fault when we not only couldn’t vote, but we weren’t even born yet? take some fucking accountability and realize that maybe just maybe the previous generations didn’t do anything to help those in need. you want me to blame an entire class of people but not boomers? such a hypocrite on top of everything else.
My reading comprehension is just fine. You don't write clearly. You responded to my earlier comment "you don’t understand how there’s no benefits left because yall are actively voting to strip them away?" Who is "yall" in that sentence, when your response is to ME? I'm not the government, I'm not some congresscritter. You're one of those in the comments section here, like the author of the original post, seemingly blaming an entire generational cohort for the political actions of the 1%. "Boomers" aren't the ones who shipped jobs overseas, blew asset bubbles benefiting the super-wealthy, privatized all sorts of public resources. There are sharp class differences WITHIN the Boomer generation, just as there are in your generation. Why are you lashing out in this manner, when it's not a generation writ large who have fucked things up, not just for your generation, but for the generations that came before you? How does this help, in any way, to build a movement that can serve the interest of the vast majority of us? "Us" (since I better make clear, lest you incorrectly interpret that in generational terms) means working people, as opposed to the rentier class.
Sometimes assholes are right. Even if all billionaires had 100% of their wealth seized, and defense spending was cut to zero, there is not enough revenue to pay for existing retirement entitlements.
Nonsense. As Keynes noted decades ago, we can afford anything we can do. If the resources, technology, and people are available, "money" is not the issue. It's created by strokes on a keyboard. Just so you know: taxes do NOT fund the Federal government, which is the sovereign currency issuer. It's somehow never an issue when it comes to the war budget.
You cannot simply escape the laws of supply and demand by printing some pieces of paper. Refer to Weimar Germany, many of the post-Soviet states, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. These countless examples are obvious, and yet old fools like you still fail to learn.
Yes, inflation becomes a problem if more money is created when there aren't people and resources available for productive purposes. But there's WAY more to this than you, and conventional mis-wisdom, think.
Oh, yes, and inflation is a problem, simple observation would make that apparent. If that's not obvious to you, then I have no reason to talk with you, because there's no arguing someone out of their religion.
I won't say that monetary economics is my specialization, but I've personally researched inflation in the United States, and it is caused primarily by Federal Reserve action and to a lesser extent government deficit spending (which affects short term price fluctuations), even if you take factors like productivity growth, income, and unemployment into account.
I'm not going to give Modern Monetary Theory a nuanced rebuttal because, quite frankly, it is flat-earth economics and is not worthy of having any more time spent on it than what more reputable economists have already spent on it. Even Keynes had a few actual worthwhile observations (sticky prices, animal spirits) that I would acknowledge, but MMT is actually trite drivel.
Thank you for this. When social security was created, it was meant to supplement your savings so that you would not sink into poverty; it was not meant to fund decades of luxury. My people, who were farmers, never retired, and they always lived frugality, as do I. I tried retirement, but went back to work to avoid being driven crazy by boredom. People are not meant for inactivity. I hope I can work until I die. I have no desire to live with a bunch of retirees in a bungalow neat a golf course and discuss what kind of wine they're serving a tonight's key party.
I wonder if part of the "boomer problem" is that they were the first generation to be almost wholly controlled by the propaganda of the cabal. (Yes, I know WW 1 and 2 and feminism were successful propaganda efforts, but people were still mostly self-sufficient and centered on God and family, not self).
Thought experiment: what would happen if the world had the same attitude toward usury that it used to? What if individual banks competed against each other freely in hiring out money that was actually tethered to a real resource, and that they actually held?
This article is not criticizing all Boomers, only successful Boomers who did not value the future. That said, a lot of the resentment stems from cultural, rather than purely economic reasons. A certain portion of the Boomer generation is blamed for having inherited an extremely successful American way of life, and then rejecting it for a path of hedonic individualism. In particular, this segment of boomers can be held responsible for not having enough children to keep the American social system afloat. I bear no ill will to the Boomers who stuck to the old American philosophy.
This is so lame. While some of what you write is true—especially about the political class declining to address the issue. However, the only reason there’s a shortfall is because Reagan grabbed a huge chunk of fica money in the eighties and never repaid it. And the only thing keeping the program from being solvent indefinitely is political unwillingness to remove the earnings cap on contributions. Making boomers out to be the assholes is just another way of creating societal divisions that distract from the real problem—the siphoning of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of wealthy people and large corporations. I’d have more respect for you argument if you would acknowledge these rather basic influences on the problem
That is absolutely not the source of the problem. The problem with social security is that it is a Ponzi scheme. It is fundamentally unsustainable because it promises lavish returns to early investors and the only way to keep paying is to get exponentially more people to pay in.
Clinton wasn't a Democrat....he was a neo-liberal and aligned with many Republicans. NAFTA was floated at Reagan and he and his people knew it would decimate the already hollowed out industrial/manufacturing sector, so refused to sign on. NAFTA was trotted out to Bush and he waved it away knowing what the outcome would be. Nope, Billary Clinton signed on the dotted line, the stock market roared, manufacturing left for China BUT our air and water became better! Meanwhile, there are human rights violations in foreign manufacturing, the poor are staying poor abroad and China is choking on its own orange haze. Meanwhile at home, we have a hollowed out Middle Class, manufacturing is at a low....but the uber wealthy are still making loads of $$$$$....and collecting benefits of the social safety net even though they don't have need.
The historical aberration of retirement as we have it now will disappear eventually, which will sadly happen as Boomers eat their fill and then some, with their children left to pay for it with no reward. This fundamental breaking of the natural process, where each generation pays their share forward for the sake of their progeny means that the liberal foundation itself will be discarded, since the supposed affluence and surplus of yesterday will not be available anymore to butress any discrepancies in the society, but those contradictions will instead have to be resolved in the here and now.
Perhaps the solution is to limit the franchise to those people who pay their taxes (i.e still working), no representation without taxation. A cohort of society that lives solely to vote for their own entitlements is a problem.no matter their age.
Can you even hear yourself? WTF is a society or government for if not to care for its citizens. I hope your progeny, if any, read this and take appropriate action when they find out how little you care for their well-being.
I'm all for caring for the elderly and the less fortunate. I am opposed to an unlimited fund open to an ever growing number of elderly that suck wealth out of the shrinking pool of young to the point of fertility collapse.
Either the entitlements are shrunk, or the slack is picked up on a personal basis by each family. Baby boomers aren't at fault for using the system as it was given to them, but if they refuse to vote for policies that support the young, as opposed to padding out their pensions without end, or fail to pass on the inheritances by blowing them on endless cruises, they only engender generational envy.
We did not have it handed to us. We fucking fought for it.
Our fathers fought and died in labor wars of the 30s. Many of us have urged workers to fight like we did. I have a defined benefit pension and med bennies and enjoyed a 36 hr work week with weeks of paid annual vacation BECAUSE we had five unions where I started working in the 70s. Women weren’t even allowed to work overtime, in production jobs, in outside sales when I first started. That came to a screeching halt through strikes or the threat thereof, at great personal expense. So some CEO poor couldn’t have a gazillion billion $$$, boo hoo.
Now, a demoralized and undereducated workforce is atomized and helpless against the neo Robber Barons of the world. And worse, propagandized to believe they deserve nothing for a lifetime of labor.
What wage slave family can bring in elderly relatives or will, in a culture of “every man an island”? Sink or swim, strangle on your bootstraps, there’s 10 brass rings and you missed yours, sucker. Ridiculous.
If you want it to put it in such stark terms - if its between my children having a chance and furnishing you with your retirement, I'll choose my children. Its not a choice we should be making, but if your attitude is "fuck you, got mine" then I am happy to blow up the ponzi scheme of social security right now, so I can start saving for my kids' college or to give them a chance to own their home, instead of paying exorbitant taxes so you can whinge about "in my day".
Its pure mathematic - fewer people pay in, more take out, more people live longer in retirement than they do working, how do we make up the difference? Answer is not immigration and its not shitting on the young, because ultimately it's a betrayal of social contract.
Vis-a-vis atomization and social dimensions - where the hell were you when it all fell apart, well before I was born? Oh wait, you used it all and enjoyed it. Your sob story about fighting for things feels like you riding on past glories while asking everyone else to put their lives on pause until you had your golden time.
The answer is no. Perhaps you need to be told that over and over until you understand I owe you nothing, and to steal from the next generation is the greatest sin of all.
Well, if that’s all you got from my response, this perfectly illustrates my point of a poorly educated and easily propagandized population of peasant minds, exactly the outcome predicted as reading comprehension scores plummeted over the past 50 decades. I want everyone to have what they need, and to work for what they want.
You are criticising unfunded US public entitlement programs, not retirement or the boomer generation. They are serious category errors that mean you have wasted your time on a silly argument.
Great article! It's not that Boomers as individuals are evil but they as a generation are structurally incentivized to push against the interests of us young people.
The enemy is NOT an age group you g’damn fool. It’s not a religion or skin color or pick-a-foreigner coming across your hallowed borders. And it’s not your neighbor. It’s capitalism. Wealth can be grown in but one way. TAKING what you have and then blaming whatever arbitrary entity that’s at hand for your growing misery. Wake. The. Fuck. Up!!!!!
If you think US boomers are cosseted just look at the uk. "Triple lock" on the old age pension so it rises annually by the greatest of wages, inflation or 2.5%. National Health Service free for ever. Both politically untouchable (though left wing mythology says the conservatives are longing to sell the NHS off and make a fortune for their private equity buddies)
Ironically it's the middle aged who worry about money, the boomers feel secure enough that they can worry about immigration instead
Mind you, as a not rich but comfortably poor UKian I don't worry about anything. I would however be terrified of embarking on old age under US medical arrangements
I read your article with interest. But reading the boomer comments on here that followed is where the real magic is at. Holy shit, these people’s brains are calcified, lmao.
Ad hominem jibes do not constitute an argument one way or the other. The US has a pair of problems with its national government’s unsustainable debt burden and its wealth. The wealthy class seek to solve the former by making the rest pay for it, and they exploit the intellectual weakness of those some people by causing them to acquiesce to growing wealth inequality. Blaming the so-called Boomer group as a whole is merely another distraction to enable the rort to continue. The per capita US GDP is the highest of any major nation (other, much smaller countries are ranked higher, but only China approaches the US) but its wealth distribution is among the worst. The US spends the most on health care but has the lowest average life expectancy of any developed country. If you stopped believing the divisive BS that the hyper-rich Social Darwinists keep feeding you, you might stand a chance of doing something about it.
Full disclosure: I’m a boomer and I live in the UK. I think this is a good analysis, but if I may I’d like to add a bit more. Our generation was also sold the idea that hard work pays off, and that hard work deserves fair pay. A lot of us achieved fair pay through unionisation, most people did work incredibly hard and the promise of retirement, much like the promise of Heaven after death, was a powerful motivator. Pension schemes flourished and those who had been sensible enough to buy into them early into their working life have benefited enormously. People who worked in low paid jobs in factories and heavy industries who previously would have died in poverty when unable to physically work any more, were able to live in dignity on modest pensions instead. For a while it did seem like an excellent deal - companies got willing workers to do horrible jobs, and the workers got the illusion of a comfortable retirement. Deindustrialisation and the separation of the ultra-rich (the Nu-aristocracy as I call them) destroyed that illusion fully. Your generation has seen through the myth of ‘hard work pays’ entirely and I love the fact that many of you work half-heartedly for big bosses or take off on your own work adventures. When I retired last year at 67 years old, I felt like I’d emerged from a fever dream where I’d been in some weird trance where I believed that ‘working hard’ was the only choice I’d had. I worked in healthcare and education, I’ve saved lives and I’ve transformed lives, and I have a reasonable living standard and am lucky to live in a country with free healthcare (which I paid for through taxes all my life). But I look at the rich and super rich in the UK who benefited from higher paying industries and generous pension schemes and they’re by and large sitting around criticising young people just like their parents did when when they were young. They were the demographic who voted for Brexit, removing opportunities for all the young people of the UK, they vote to keep themselves rich and avoid paying taxes as if another penny on their pound would dent their comfort. The horrible truth is that they really think that they ‘earned’ their money through working harder than the rest of us, that they were able to do that because they were cleverer. So they sneer at everyone else. Selfish fuckers. In the US it’s even worse where all the Trust fund boomers and their entitled children claim it’s all ‘hard work’ and superior intelligence that got them there. They literally hate and despise anyone who isn’t rich. Money corrupts, and people are selfish.
The other thing is that we became comfortable because of the dividend of peace and international laws that were developed after WW2. We literally thought ‘this is it, the world will be a benign place for us forever’ (well, I didn’t, but most of our generation do). But it did work for a long time and breaking it will not make any of countries safer.
I cannot believe that the generation who spawned the 60’s turned out to be such shits, But the truth is we were always a minority and just like the bright young things in your generation they will always be outnumbered by the selfish - you may eventually be exactly like us, sitting around criticising young people. We criticised the ‘older generation’ and swore not to be like them too.
So yes, our generation were corrupted by the promise of easy money, comfort and a decent old age, and you are absolutely right to criticise us. I criticise us. And I have zero advice to offer you because the world you’re going into is so radically different to the one I was born into. Well, one thing maybe, spend time with people you love because when you get old that is the only thing you regret not doing enough of. I promise you it’s not having ‘worked hard’.
There’s work, and there is the work. Loved ones fall into the second category. The most worthwhile one. But we still, in our own way, have to finance it. Keeping the show on the road and all that. You make some very valid points, and like me, never bought into the bs that surrounded us while growing up. Those jobs for life in factories, and other industries, have all but vanished. The unions were co-opted or made obsolete. Property ownership has become unattainable, and our universal health care systems have been transformed into long waiting lists overseen by bloated bureaucracy. I knew that I’d be working, or earning, in one form or another till I popped my clogs from an early age. I’m ok with that. My loved ones get the benefit, and I get the satisfaction of having left nothing on the pitch when I meet my maker. With energy extraction costs making the economic systems we live under become untenable in the not too distant future, a lot of the arguments around this retirement issue will cease, as a new, slower system evolves out of the current system. Have a nice weekend. Sun is shining. Enjoy your loved ones.
It wasn’t that long ago that the complaint was that the Boomers “wouldn’t let go”, wouldn’t vacate the workforce, wouldn’t give up their spots so that others might have a chance to take their seat.
It is not necessarily contradictory that 1) Boomers get way more out of retirement than they pay in and that this ruins countries
2) Keep key job positions in companies (Leader or just cushy jobs) too long and that for some reason they have much higher salaries DUE to age despite barely knowing how to handle an excel file
Theon Ultima, please work 50 hour weeks for 40 plus years. Actually pay your student loans. Raise a family. Donate $10,000s to charities every year. Worship God and support your place if worship. Be civically engaged and volunteer multiple hours each week. Forgo vacations to save money and make extra payments on the long ago paid-off mortgage. Pay huge sums of taxes year in and year out. Me: born in 1962. Won't be collecting social security until I'm 70 because a strong work ethic was instilled in me by my depression era parents. Sacrifice. Delay gratification. These are ideas your pampered life has never known. Sacrifice for years. Then maybe, just maybe, you will understand Boomers.
To paraphrase Eric Weinstein, Boomers rode the greatest economic wave in history and think it was all because of them, conveniently forgetting Bretton Woods and all that was done to help them become successful. Then, unlike prior generations, they sat in their seats too long.
Prior generations did retire, or at least step down from positions of power and do light work.
Nope, it’s not. If the gains from rising productivity had been shared with working people at the rates that existed until the mid-70’s, wealth inequality would be much less than it is now. There’s no problem funding good retirement and health care for all. Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the rest of the 0.1% might have to scuffle by with a few less trillions. Take the trillions spent on war and put them toward real security for our populace, and we can all live well, including in the decades when we’re no longer able to work.
To be fair, healthcare also requires some sane cost control. But your point is correct that a stable retirement system for all generations is quite achievable. It just requires that society act rationally to fulfill its goals instead of assuming destruction. This is a big ask in the middle of a destructive era but it’s what we can and should reach for. Don’t lose hope, build a successful society instead of just an individual survival island.
Retirement for most is a historical unknown. Family took care of the elderly, or religious orders, or local charity, or sometimes invalid hospitals for veterans.
Now in the present day we’ve been on a 30 year looting spree- in some cases longer- and it’s over and back to work- but this time, this man and his Organization he built are for real. Doesn’t mean success- or retirement either other than basic needs, but we’ve returned to reality.
For example the US military has just gone from being the US Treasuries buy if you want our defense to invest in American factories if you want protection. That suddenly makes past sacrifice worthwhile.
The military serves the common man again, more so than anytime the last century. Possibly since the Revolution.
I hate to brighten the gloom, but we are rising from nadir to the stars… now…
From a retired worker, after decades of work: you’re a flaming asshole. You, too, will get old. You will need - and will deserve - to spend your older years living with dignity, and with healthcare. Not “access to healthcare.” And all of this is more than possible. This country pisses away over a trillion dollars a year on war. Our private medical system saddles us with the highest cost for piss-poor results, especially when compared to other advanced countries and even many lower income nations. Wealth inequality is reaching Gilded Age levels. The ability to pay for secure retirements and national health care (for all ages, you twit) is there: just look at the insane billions in the hands of a tiny sliver of the population. And even with your brief hat tip toward leftists who have struggled for these things, you wind up doing the bidding of the 0.1%, pretending this is a generational rip off perpetrated by “Boomers” and not by the capitalist class. Extract head from ass, and figure out who has benefited in the past three or four decades, and aim your fire accordingly. Sheesh!
OK. Boomer
This made me laugh out loud - your comment, not the subject matter of the piece. I’m a boomer in my 70s and have never stopped working, at least part time. Still working, partly to provide for my children who will not have the safety net we boomers have been afforded. There is a lot of truth in this post and much of it is eye-opening.
Whoa, whoa. You’re forgetting the ethos of your generation: “I’ve got mine, fuck everyone else.”
Drain every fiscal drop while you can. You deserve it dear Boomer. Screw those kids and their futures.
You insist on blaming us "the Boomers" as if - as a GENERATION - we are responsible for the ripoff perpetrated by a CLASS. Once again: get your head out of your ass, and stop blaming working people for the actions of the capitalists. Our society is perfectly capable of feeding, housing, providing medical care and comfortable retirements, to all of us. It's a matter of wealth distribution, and how that wealth is put to use. I could easily rant against my parent's generation, pre-Boomers, who were able to buy houses for $35,000 that now go for way north of a million. But it wasn't my parent's fault, or the fault of their generation. Financialization of everything, increased privatization of what should be in the public sphere, and the shifting of societal wealth more and more into the hands of a tiny few, did this. Blaming an undifferentiated generation is not just lazy, it's to actively ignore and deny the class nature of society.
Just to expand on the information provided in your reply:
Since 1973 (ancient history to most, and of seemingly no relevance) income inequality has increased to the point where it is now.
Most would find it difficult to comprehend the tax rate for the wealthy was 92%, until it was lowered - to 91%. A tax rate the wealthy agreed to, btw.
Reducing the tax rate on the wealthy along with moving manufacturing offshore did a number of things - it wiped out jobs that made real tangible things, destroyed unions, ravaged the middle class, decimated small business, promoted monopolies, and privatized just about every social support mechanism the New Deal introduced to eliminate needless suffering and poverty.
Equalization starts by taxing the rich - again - and purging society of the parasitic financialization actions of the rentier class.
Otherwise, the hardships endured by the working class prior in the early 1900s will become the fate of our children and grandchildren - starting with the tragedy of child labour, for one, the degradation of education next, and the continued financialization of everything.
That is the final solution.
It’s got nothing to do with generational differences - just ignorance of what happened before rather than being terrified of what lay ahead.
YES! This. Not a generational conflict.
I’m not ignoring the class based nature of society and agree with your points. However, i can still recognize that your generation, as a whole, has severely damaged the country. Your parent’s generation bequeathed their children a wealthy, industrialized superpower, with a highly effectual and envied system of government. And the boomers, collectively, pissed that all away for short term financial gain. Not to mention the idiotic culture wars.
Anyway, enjoy your retirement and social security checks, I’m so happy to pay for my parents generation to chill at home and vote MAGA.
Christopher: you obstinately insist on blaming an undifferentiated generation for the actions of the ruling class. This is not just wrong, but it makes for very, very stupid politics. There's a sliver of YOUR generation that wants to shred the remnants of the social gains we still have. Should we blame your entire generation for the tech bros? You come across as wanting to rip away from the retired and the elderly the social support on which we depend, rather than seeking to organize across generations to ensure that your generation is able to receive these benefits, and MORE! The idea is to level UP, not to tear down.
The "Boomers" did not "collectively" piss away the "wealthy, industrialized superpower." It took an organized working class in the 1930's and later to win Social Security, Medicare. It also took the existence of post-capitalist societies elsewhere in the world to put the fear of working class revolt into the hearts of the ruling class, thus encouraging them to share a few crumbs of the massive wealth we create. But they never intended for that to happen, and first chance they got, they've moved to cut it all back. The attacks on Social Security were there from the very beginning, and for some insane reason, you echo those attacks! If you want your generation to have health care, secure retirement, affordable housing, good public education, you need to organize and fight for it. You'll find plenty of Boomers joining you in solidarity. But don't piss on our leg and tell us it's raining!
Great comment.
so you’re one of those boomers. got it. the money and the healthcare and any other socialist benefits the US govt gets are not on the table for us plebians.
Please explain your comment. It reads to me like you have simply swallowed the ruling class propaganda that ANYthing that actually benefits the working citizenry of the country is "unaffordable." The rich bastards didn't give us any of this without a fight. It will take struggle (strikes, political organizing) to maintain and expand those gains. At a time of gross wealth inequality, trillion dollar war budgets, privatization of health care, education, even such simple things as the parking meters (see Chicago), the idea that we don't have the resources or ability to provide a decent old age and health care for all, is simply preposterous. You have given up without even trying! This is NOT a generational battle. There are asshole squillionaires in your generation intent on taking us back to the 1890's. You gonna put up with that?
you don’t understand how there’s no benefits left because yall are actively voting to strip them away? you don’t understand how the US govt has socialist healthcare and unlimited pto while no one else does? do you live under a rock or are you just ignoring it?
there’s definitely no squillionaires in my generation. that would require yours to stop hoarding more wealth than they can spend, and more houses than they can live in. i have not given up, but i’m also logical. i can see how screwed we are given the choices your generation made. it must be nice to be the only group to receive all the socialist benefits that are being decimated by the boomers in office. that must be my generations fault too though. since yall can’t take any accountability.
Lea, in what universe do you live? The Unites States most definitely DOES NOT have "socialist healthcare." We have the most expensive health care non-system in the advanced capitalist countries, providing much worse outcomes at much higher cost. Unlimited paid time off? For whom? Where? What are you smoking? Again, quit blaming a generation for the actions of a CLASS (which extends across generations.) The way you talk, you'd claim the average wealth of a baseball stadium's worth of people suddenly soared, because Bill Gates walked in. Technically true, but utterly ridiculous as a method of analysis of wealth inequality. Wages in this country have been basically stuck since the 1970's. Working people have been struggling to hold on to the gains we made through union organizing in the 1930's and in the first decade or two after WWII, when the rest of the world was in ruins and the US stood bestride the world. But we never made the necessary step to break politically with the two capitalist parties, one of the major reasons we never achieved universal health care, or national retirement beyond basically a subsistence level (you try living on Social Security alone: you will quickly discard the illusion that the millions of elderly trying to scrape by on it are the cause of your distress.) In my working life (decades in a factory environment, the last 35 fortunately unionized) I was on strike five times, almost always to preserve health care coverage, something that shouldn't have been a subject of union/employer bargaining in the first place if we actually had the socialist healthcare of which you speak. Seriously: where are you getting your vision of class relations in this country? It is not in accord with reality.
wow you can’t read for shit apparently my dude. go back and read what i wrote. i quite literally said WE don’t, but a small group (elected officials) have borderline socialist healthcare and PTO benefits that would rival europe. so you’re not paying attention AND you can’t be bothered to read either. you have so much to say, but you can’t be bothered to actually read AND UNDERSTAND what others are saying before you start spewing fucking garbage about how i’m wrong, but you don’t even know what i said 😂 you quite literally flipped my entire point because you lack basic reading comprehension. talking to you is like talking to a brick wall. seriously where are you getting your vision of what i actually said? it’s not according to reality.
your strikes didn’t do anything, this country is still shit. and it is quite literally the previous generations fault. how can it be our fault when we not only couldn’t vote, but we weren’t even born yet? take some fucking accountability and realize that maybe just maybe the previous generations didn’t do anything to help those in need. you want me to blame an entire class of people but not boomers? such a hypocrite on top of everything else.
My reading comprehension is just fine. You don't write clearly. You responded to my earlier comment "you don’t understand how there’s no benefits left because yall are actively voting to strip them away?" Who is "yall" in that sentence, when your response is to ME? I'm not the government, I'm not some congresscritter. You're one of those in the comments section here, like the author of the original post, seemingly blaming an entire generational cohort for the political actions of the 1%. "Boomers" aren't the ones who shipped jobs overseas, blew asset bubbles benefiting the super-wealthy, privatized all sorts of public resources. There are sharp class differences WITHIN the Boomer generation, just as there are in your generation. Why are you lashing out in this manner, when it's not a generation writ large who have fucked things up, not just for your generation, but for the generations that came before you? How does this help, in any way, to build a movement that can serve the interest of the vast majority of us? "Us" (since I better make clear, lest you incorrectly interpret that in generational terms) means working people, as opposed to the rentier class.
Sometimes assholes are right. Even if all billionaires had 100% of their wealth seized, and defense spending was cut to zero, there is not enough revenue to pay for existing retirement entitlements.
Nonsense. As Keynes noted decades ago, we can afford anything we can do. If the resources, technology, and people are available, "money" is not the issue. It's created by strokes on a keyboard. Just so you know: taxes do NOT fund the Federal government, which is the sovereign currency issuer. It's somehow never an issue when it comes to the war budget.
With all due respect, Keynes was an idiot :)
You cannot simply escape the laws of supply and demand by printing some pieces of paper. Refer to Weimar Germany, many of the post-Soviet states, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. These countless examples are obvious, and yet old fools like you still fail to learn.
Read this:
https://mmt101.substack.com/p/my-mmt-top-ten-modern-monetary-theorys
Yes, inflation becomes a problem if more money is created when there aren't people and resources available for productive purposes. But there's WAY more to this than you, and conventional mis-wisdom, think.
Oh, yes, and inflation is a problem, simple observation would make that apparent. If that's not obvious to you, then I have no reason to talk with you, because there's no arguing someone out of their religion.
I won't say that monetary economics is my specialization, but I've personally researched inflation in the United States, and it is caused primarily by Federal Reserve action and to a lesser extent government deficit spending (which affects short term price fluctuations), even if you take factors like productivity growth, income, and unemployment into account.
I'm not going to give Modern Monetary Theory a nuanced rebuttal because, quite frankly, it is flat-earth economics and is not worthy of having any more time spent on it than what more reputable economists have already spent on it. Even Keynes had a few actual worthwhile observations (sticky prices, animal spirits) that I would acknowledge, but MMT is actually trite drivel.
Thank you for this. When social security was created, it was meant to supplement your savings so that you would not sink into poverty; it was not meant to fund decades of luxury. My people, who were farmers, never retired, and they always lived frugality, as do I. I tried retirement, but went back to work to avoid being driven crazy by boredom. People are not meant for inactivity. I hope I can work until I die. I have no desire to live with a bunch of retirees in a bungalow neat a golf course and discuss what kind of wine they're serving a tonight's key party.
I wonder if part of the "boomer problem" is that they were the first generation to be almost wholly controlled by the propaganda of the cabal. (Yes, I know WW 1 and 2 and feminism were successful propaganda efforts, but people were still mostly self-sufficient and centered on God and family, not self).
Thought experiment: what would happen if the world had the same attitude toward usury that it used to? What if individual banks competed against each other freely in hiring out money that was actually tethered to a real resource, and that they actually held?
ok boomer
Do you have an actual argument, any real points to make? If not, why do you even bother?
This article is not criticizing all Boomers, only successful Boomers who did not value the future. That said, a lot of the resentment stems from cultural, rather than purely economic reasons. A certain portion of the Boomer generation is blamed for having inherited an extremely successful American way of life, and then rejecting it for a path of hedonic individualism. In particular, this segment of boomers can be held responsible for not having enough children to keep the American social system afloat. I bear no ill will to the Boomers who stuck to the old American philosophy.
No, they really do hate me and the pre-Boomer retirees for being “greedy”. Read the words again. Believe the hate embedded there. Embrace the hatred.
This is so lame. While some of what you write is true—especially about the political class declining to address the issue. However, the only reason there’s a shortfall is because Reagan grabbed a huge chunk of fica money in the eighties and never repaid it. And the only thing keeping the program from being solvent indefinitely is political unwillingness to remove the earnings cap on contributions. Making boomers out to be the assholes is just another way of creating societal divisions that distract from the real problem—the siphoning of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of wealthy people and large corporations. I’d have more respect for you argument if you would acknowledge these rather basic influences on the problem
That is absolutely not the source of the problem. The problem with social security is that it is a Ponzi scheme. It is fundamentally unsustainable because it promises lavish returns to early investors and the only way to keep paying is to get exponentially more people to pay in.
Lavish returns- ha!
And Clintonian democrats sold us out via nafta
Clinton wasn't a Democrat....he was a neo-liberal and aligned with many Republicans. NAFTA was floated at Reagan and he and his people knew it would decimate the already hollowed out industrial/manufacturing sector, so refused to sign on. NAFTA was trotted out to Bush and he waved it away knowing what the outcome would be. Nope, Billary Clinton signed on the dotted line, the stock market roared, manufacturing left for China BUT our air and water became better! Meanwhile, there are human rights violations in foreign manufacturing, the poor are staying poor abroad and China is choking on its own orange haze. Meanwhile at home, we have a hollowed out Middle Class, manufacturing is at a low....but the uber wealthy are still making loads of $$$$$....and collecting benefits of the social safety net even though they don't have need.
Who voted for Reagan? Oh wait it was the boomers…
Silly comment. Who else was old enough?
That was an unnecessarily lengthy and verbose pile of horse shit.
Bit long, some repetitions (see there is value in editors) but well written and argued, ledsen as they around here
Ok boomer
You are literally the person this is about. Lol, lmao even.
The historical aberration of retirement as we have it now will disappear eventually, which will sadly happen as Boomers eat their fill and then some, with their children left to pay for it with no reward. This fundamental breaking of the natural process, where each generation pays their share forward for the sake of their progeny means that the liberal foundation itself will be discarded, since the supposed affluence and surplus of yesterday will not be available anymore to butress any discrepancies in the society, but those contradictions will instead have to be resolved in the here and now.
Perhaps the solution is to limit the franchise to those people who pay their taxes (i.e still working), no representation without taxation. A cohort of society that lives solely to vote for their own entitlements is a problem.no matter their age.
Can you even hear yourself? WTF is a society or government for if not to care for its citizens. I hope your progeny, if any, read this and take appropriate action when they find out how little you care for their well-being.
I'm all for caring for the elderly and the less fortunate. I am opposed to an unlimited fund open to an ever growing number of elderly that suck wealth out of the shrinking pool of young to the point of fertility collapse.
Either the entitlements are shrunk, or the slack is picked up on a personal basis by each family. Baby boomers aren't at fault for using the system as it was given to them, but if they refuse to vote for policies that support the young, as opposed to padding out their pensions without end, or fail to pass on the inheritances by blowing them on endless cruises, they only engender generational envy.
We did not have it handed to us. We fucking fought for it.
Our fathers fought and died in labor wars of the 30s. Many of us have urged workers to fight like we did. I have a defined benefit pension and med bennies and enjoyed a 36 hr work week with weeks of paid annual vacation BECAUSE we had five unions where I started working in the 70s. Women weren’t even allowed to work overtime, in production jobs, in outside sales when I first started. That came to a screeching halt through strikes or the threat thereof, at great personal expense. So some CEO poor couldn’t have a gazillion billion $$$, boo hoo.
Now, a demoralized and undereducated workforce is atomized and helpless against the neo Robber Barons of the world. And worse, propagandized to believe they deserve nothing for a lifetime of labor.
What wage slave family can bring in elderly relatives or will, in a culture of “every man an island”? Sink or swim, strangle on your bootstraps, there’s 10 brass rings and you missed yours, sucker. Ridiculous.
Can you just chill for a couple years while we die? Quit with the hovering vulture act? Meanwhile, get to work for yours.
If you want it to put it in such stark terms - if its between my children having a chance and furnishing you with your retirement, I'll choose my children. Its not a choice we should be making, but if your attitude is "fuck you, got mine" then I am happy to blow up the ponzi scheme of social security right now, so I can start saving for my kids' college or to give them a chance to own their home, instead of paying exorbitant taxes so you can whinge about "in my day".
Its pure mathematic - fewer people pay in, more take out, more people live longer in retirement than they do working, how do we make up the difference? Answer is not immigration and its not shitting on the young, because ultimately it's a betrayal of social contract.
Vis-a-vis atomization and social dimensions - where the hell were you when it all fell apart, well before I was born? Oh wait, you used it all and enjoyed it. Your sob story about fighting for things feels like you riding on past glories while asking everyone else to put their lives on pause until you had your golden time.
The answer is no. Perhaps you need to be told that over and over until you understand I owe you nothing, and to steal from the next generation is the greatest sin of all.
Well, if that’s all you got from my response, this perfectly illustrates my point of a poorly educated and easily propagandized population of peasant minds, exactly the outcome predicted as reading comprehension scores plummeted over the past 50 decades. I want everyone to have what they need, and to work for what they want.
You are criticising unfunded US public entitlement programs, not retirement or the boomer generation. They are serious category errors that mean you have wasted your time on a silly argument.
Great article! It's not that Boomers as individuals are evil but they as a generation are structurally incentivized to push against the interests of us young people.
The enemy is NOT an age group you g’damn fool. It’s not a religion or skin color or pick-a-foreigner coming across your hallowed borders. And it’s not your neighbor. It’s capitalism. Wealth can be grown in but one way. TAKING what you have and then blaming whatever arbitrary entity that’s at hand for your growing misery. Wake. The. Fuck. Up!!!!!
If you think US boomers are cosseted just look at the uk. "Triple lock" on the old age pension so it rises annually by the greatest of wages, inflation or 2.5%. National Health Service free for ever. Both politically untouchable (though left wing mythology says the conservatives are longing to sell the NHS off and make a fortune for their private equity buddies)
Ironically it's the middle aged who worry about money, the boomers feel secure enough that they can worry about immigration instead
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-do-voters-actually-want-each-age-groups-key-issues_uk_66585ba8e4b08f9fa13f7a8e
Mind you, as a not rich but comfortably poor UKian I don't worry about anything. I would however be terrified of embarking on old age under US medical arrangements
I read your article with interest. But reading the boomer comments on here that followed is where the real magic is at. Holy shit, these people’s brains are calcified, lmao.
Ad hominem jibes do not constitute an argument one way or the other. The US has a pair of problems with its national government’s unsustainable debt burden and its wealth. The wealthy class seek to solve the former by making the rest pay for it, and they exploit the intellectual weakness of those some people by causing them to acquiesce to growing wealth inequality. Blaming the so-called Boomer group as a whole is merely another distraction to enable the rort to continue. The per capita US GDP is the highest of any major nation (other, much smaller countries are ranked higher, but only China approaches the US) but its wealth distribution is among the worst. The US spends the most on health care but has the lowest average life expectancy of any developed country. If you stopped believing the divisive BS that the hyper-rich Social Darwinists keep feeding you, you might stand a chance of doing something about it.
Full disclosure: I’m a boomer and I live in the UK. I think this is a good analysis, but if I may I’d like to add a bit more. Our generation was also sold the idea that hard work pays off, and that hard work deserves fair pay. A lot of us achieved fair pay through unionisation, most people did work incredibly hard and the promise of retirement, much like the promise of Heaven after death, was a powerful motivator. Pension schemes flourished and those who had been sensible enough to buy into them early into their working life have benefited enormously. People who worked in low paid jobs in factories and heavy industries who previously would have died in poverty when unable to physically work any more, were able to live in dignity on modest pensions instead. For a while it did seem like an excellent deal - companies got willing workers to do horrible jobs, and the workers got the illusion of a comfortable retirement. Deindustrialisation and the separation of the ultra-rich (the Nu-aristocracy as I call them) destroyed that illusion fully. Your generation has seen through the myth of ‘hard work pays’ entirely and I love the fact that many of you work half-heartedly for big bosses or take off on your own work adventures. When I retired last year at 67 years old, I felt like I’d emerged from a fever dream where I’d been in some weird trance where I believed that ‘working hard’ was the only choice I’d had. I worked in healthcare and education, I’ve saved lives and I’ve transformed lives, and I have a reasonable living standard and am lucky to live in a country with free healthcare (which I paid for through taxes all my life). But I look at the rich and super rich in the UK who benefited from higher paying industries and generous pension schemes and they’re by and large sitting around criticising young people just like their parents did when when they were young. They were the demographic who voted for Brexit, removing opportunities for all the young people of the UK, they vote to keep themselves rich and avoid paying taxes as if another penny on their pound would dent their comfort. The horrible truth is that they really think that they ‘earned’ their money through working harder than the rest of us, that they were able to do that because they were cleverer. So they sneer at everyone else. Selfish fuckers. In the US it’s even worse where all the Trust fund boomers and their entitled children claim it’s all ‘hard work’ and superior intelligence that got them there. They literally hate and despise anyone who isn’t rich. Money corrupts, and people are selfish.
The other thing is that we became comfortable because of the dividend of peace and international laws that were developed after WW2. We literally thought ‘this is it, the world will be a benign place for us forever’ (well, I didn’t, but most of our generation do). But it did work for a long time and breaking it will not make any of countries safer.
I cannot believe that the generation who spawned the 60’s turned out to be such shits, But the truth is we were always a minority and just like the bright young things in your generation they will always be outnumbered by the selfish - you may eventually be exactly like us, sitting around criticising young people. We criticised the ‘older generation’ and swore not to be like them too.
So yes, our generation were corrupted by the promise of easy money, comfort and a decent old age, and you are absolutely right to criticise us. I criticise us. And I have zero advice to offer you because the world you’re going into is so radically different to the one I was born into. Well, one thing maybe, spend time with people you love because when you get old that is the only thing you regret not doing enough of. I promise you it’s not having ‘worked hard’.
There’s work, and there is the work. Loved ones fall into the second category. The most worthwhile one. But we still, in our own way, have to finance it. Keeping the show on the road and all that. You make some very valid points, and like me, never bought into the bs that surrounded us while growing up. Those jobs for life in factories, and other industries, have all but vanished. The unions were co-opted or made obsolete. Property ownership has become unattainable, and our universal health care systems have been transformed into long waiting lists overseen by bloated bureaucracy. I knew that I’d be working, or earning, in one form or another till I popped my clogs from an early age. I’m ok with that. My loved ones get the benefit, and I get the satisfaction of having left nothing on the pitch when I meet my maker. With energy extraction costs making the economic systems we live under become untenable in the not too distant future, a lot of the arguments around this retirement issue will cease, as a new, slower system evolves out of the current system. Have a nice weekend. Sun is shining. Enjoy your loved ones.
It wasn’t that long ago that the complaint was that the Boomers “wouldn’t let go”, wouldn’t vacate the workforce, wouldn’t give up their spots so that others might have a chance to take their seat.
It is not necessarily contradictory that 1) Boomers get way more out of retirement than they pay in and that this ruins countries
2) Keep key job positions in companies (Leader or just cushy jobs) too long and that for some reason they have much higher salaries DUE to age despite barely knowing how to handle an excel file
Theon Ultima, please work 50 hour weeks for 40 plus years. Actually pay your student loans. Raise a family. Donate $10,000s to charities every year. Worship God and support your place if worship. Be civically engaged and volunteer multiple hours each week. Forgo vacations to save money and make extra payments on the long ago paid-off mortgage. Pay huge sums of taxes year in and year out. Me: born in 1962. Won't be collecting social security until I'm 70 because a strong work ethic was instilled in me by my depression era parents. Sacrifice. Delay gratification. These are ideas your pampered life has never known. Sacrifice for years. Then maybe, just maybe, you will understand Boomers.
To paraphrase Eric Weinstein, Boomers rode the greatest economic wave in history and think it was all because of them, conveniently forgetting Bretton Woods and all that was done to help them become successful. Then, unlike prior generations, they sat in their seats too long.
Prior generations did retire, or at least step down from positions of power and do light work.
My grandfather did this, my Boomer father didn’t.
I’m a ssi receiving Boomer and believes your article Is correct.
Nope, it’s not. If the gains from rising productivity had been shared with working people at the rates that existed until the mid-70’s, wealth inequality would be much less than it is now. There’s no problem funding good retirement and health care for all. Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the rest of the 0.1% might have to scuffle by with a few less trillions. Take the trillions spent on war and put them toward real security for our populace, and we can all live well, including in the decades when we’re no longer able to work.
To be fair, healthcare also requires some sane cost control. But your point is correct that a stable retirement system for all generations is quite achievable. It just requires that society act rationally to fulfill its goals instead of assuming destruction. This is a big ask in the middle of a destructive era but it’s what we can and should reach for. Don’t lose hope, build a successful society instead of just an individual survival island.
Boomers are so fragile judging from these comments...
Retirement for most is a historical unknown. Family took care of the elderly, or religious orders, or local charity, or sometimes invalid hospitals for veterans.
Now in the present day we’ve been on a 30 year looting spree- in some cases longer- and it’s over and back to work- but this time, this man and his Organization he built are for real. Doesn’t mean success- or retirement either other than basic needs, but we’ve returned to reality.
For example the US military has just gone from being the US Treasuries buy if you want our defense to invest in American factories if you want protection. That suddenly makes past sacrifice worthwhile.
The military serves the common man again, more so than anytime the last century. Possibly since the Revolution.
I hate to brighten the gloom, but we are rising from nadir to the stars… now…