The Baby Boomer Scorecard—We Own It
Speaking to a congressional panel made up primarily of baby boomers, 17-year-old climate activist Jamie Margolis said, “The fact that you are staring at a panel of young people testifying before you today pleading for a livable earth should not fill you with pride, it should fill you with shame.” As one of the boomers, I admit that hurt. But we own this, don’t we? Let’s try to be fact-based and rational.
Margolis of course was talking about climate change, but she could have been talking about any number of ways that the baby boom generation is leaving the world worse off than we found it. Let’s start with climate change. Rising planetary temperatures due to carbon emissions did not begin with the baby boom generation, nor are we wholly responsible for it. What we are responsible for is not reacting commensurately with the growing scientific consensus about what lies ahead, a consensus that is supplemented by what has become a daily torrent of growing hardship related to it. (See our Climate Watch.)
Although the focus of the recent demonstration was climate change, only last year we witnessed the March for Our Lives, organized also by teenagers imploring the “adults” to take action against gun violence. Again, baby boomers didn’t write the Second Amendment or invent the assault rifle, but we are failing to act while our progeny are at an increasing risk of being assaulted in their schools.
We continue to benefit from infrastructure and research investments made by prior generations—think interstate highways, the construction of which spanned six administrations; hydroelectric dams; the space program; and the electrical grid, to name a few. For our part, our generation is leaving behind an infrastructure that the American Society of Civil Engineers grades as D+ globally and estimates is in need of $4.5 trillion in investment over the next 10 years. Ironically, this is a topic where both parties ostensibly agree, yet are unable to reach a compromise on policy.
Our generation has watched healthcare costs rise to levels unaffordable by a significant percentage of our fellow citizens, while at the same time scoring poorly on several traditional measures of healthcare quality.
Although the uncompetitive state of public education in non-wealthy communities has been well understood since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1982, no meaningful improvement has been accomplished, and we continue to resign a large segment of the population to an inferior education.
Perhaps our most irresponsible legacy is the enormous national debt. It is customary to match the duration of funding to the duration of the investment. In other words, if we invest in a new electrical grid, it has been considered fair to ask subsequent generations to shoulder part of the investment because they will benefit from it. We, however, have departed from this discipline and grown our national debt to record and potentially unsustainable levels, by using debt to fund current consumption instead of making investments with long-term benefits. The problems we leave behind will take enormous resources to fix, but we have left the next generation with little borrowing capacity to do so.
While it is tempting to deflect responsibility for this record, the facts are stubborn things. And these facts we own.