Tuesday 27 June 2017

The passing of baby boomer economics and politics

Baby boomer politicians/ policies have been rejected in elections over the last year, whether Trump, Sanders, Brexit or other near misses in the EU.

In the UK we have the following. US is a slightly different mix of issues and the EU countries are a bit more social democrat. But basically the same themes run across all of these countries, just a slightly different mix.

What the Baby Boomers got wrong:
  • Didnt pay for their education but charged their children's generation
  • Havent saved for retirement
  • Havent funded their pensions
  • Havent funded their social care/ health care liabilities
  • Havent built enough housing/ have blown up price bubbles
  • Have protected the green belt
  • Put causes ahead of pragmatism, eg foreign aid budget, green energy, multi-culturalism
  • Have allowed the manufacturing sector to be gutted
  • Ran up a massive debt pile as they didnt fund their spending at the government level
  • Are responsible for the boom/ bust economics
  • Repeatedly elected a class of career politicians who did nothing but use focus groups and corporate lobbyists and avoided hard decisions - avoiding hard decisions is a key baby boomer trait
  • Allowed mass immigration particularly with lowly educated people from cultures that do not integrate into a modern, western, law abiding lifestyle
  • For fear of hurting feelings, constrained the police and allowed large urban areas to become no-go areas
  • Allowed organisations such as ISIS and Al-Qaida to become established

Basically they are the artist/ prophet generations coming in the first and second turnings and now going into retirement as we proceed through to the end of the third turning.

They are being displaced in part as Millennials and Gen-X'ers are voting more and in part as baby boomers start to die off.

The latter two need change and are voting it in and the change will pretty much deliver the opposite of the above. Any politician who doesnt get that and who doesnt deliver a change based policy platform has little chance.

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