When you Start Taking Flak…

I'm an early edge Gen-Xer.

I went to a state college when it was still affordable. My niece went to the same college and it was an order of magnitude more expensive.

I watched my parents, both lower-mid middle class move up from house to house over the decades after buying their first house not long out of college. That is financially impossible for the current generation of graduates.

I have watched health care costs explode in the US, while US health outcomes started lagging the rest of the industrialized world.

I started working in the 80s. I know that salaries in the US in particular and partly in the EU have stagnated since that time.

I've been really lucky. I emigrated to a social democratic country and became self-employed. So I've been spared a lot of the pain, but particularly since the dotcom bust PNTR with China, rates stopped growing with inflation.

I started voting in the 80s, but we were college kids with no pull. The people pulling the strings since the 80s have been the Boomers. Clinton age people.

The Dems in the 80s decided to stop being the party of the workers. Since that time the boomers all decided — with your votes and positions of power — to cash in on the investments from the 30s and 40s by not paying it forward. Since then we have one party with two heads funded by Wall Street and big business.

I’m surely sorry if you’ve had it tough — no sarcasm! I’m not saying every Boomer is equally guilty for the state of the US economy. That would be silly. But your generation was the one that put us in this situation. Not mine, and sure as hell not the poor millennials.

When you start taking flak…you know you’re over the target.