The one boom that won't end

Sorry Mum and Dad, because you guys are some of the few exceptions that prove the rule on this one, but I have to say it: want to know why the world is spiralling into depression? Blame the Baby Boomers.

I'm hardly the first to say it, but it bears repeating. My parents generation, those born between 1945 and the early Sixties to use the best working definition, are by far and away the most selfish generation of the modern era and they aren't about to stop.

Let's look at the facts. By the time my grandfather was in his early 30s like me, he'd survived a depression in his youth, fought in a savage war, spent three years in a Nazi POW camp and already had five or six kids. But it was men and women of his generation who demanded rewards for their sacrifices and they got them - these were the people who gave us universal free education, free health care in many countries, the social welfare state as we know it.

Then came the Baby Boomers. Turning 18, they did campaign and achieve some notable social change like advancing feminism and working to reduce racism and other forms of discrimination. But as they got older, this generation that had known nothing but prosperity came to demand to be kept in the style to which they had grown accustomed.

Canny politicians, usually on the center-right (a political spectrum that includes Bill Clinton, John Howard and Tony Blair) saw that the baby boomers were a decisive demographic bloc and they were politically motivated too. So to woo them, these politicians promised to take from the baby boomer's children what the baby boomer's parents had fought and died to win, so the boomers could go on living it up.

The principle of free education was sacrificed. Put simply, if you are my age and have student debt - people in the UK and Australia, where tertiary education was once free routinely leave uni with tens of thousands owing - that debt is effectively money the government is taking from you to give to your parents in the form of the various tax, pension, lifestyle and other breaks and goodies it needs to get elected and re-elected.

Other methods of keeping the Boomers sweet were more insidious. Having created a culture of property-price obsession alien to their parents - and even to their contemporaries in France and Germany - the Anglosphere boomers thus implicitly demanded that government keep house prices rising, so they could take their banks advice and withdraw equity from their home to fritter on five holidays a year, knowing that by the time they got back, their house would have risen in value sufficiently to cover the spending.

This lead DIRECTLY to governments looseing up the restrictions on money supply and the price of money. To keep the wheel turning, more and more people needed to be brought into the game to keep those in the middle being pushed - albeit by illusion - ever higher. Thus the sub-prime debacle and its associated knock-ons all over the English-speaking West.

But if you think the current economic maelstrom will stop them, you're wrong. By dint of their Dads all fucking their Mums at once (as they say in sociological circles), the Boomers remain a demographic and electoral force. And advances in science mean they will be alive and voting for decades yet. Already we are seeing them use their electoral power to force taxpayers - the young - to subsidise vastly expensive drugs for them when they grow old, even when they grow terminally ill. Having done away with free health carew when they were fit and healthy and didn't need it, they are now demanding it be re-instated just as they grow frail and vulnerable. You and your children will have to work an extra two hours a day to keep a 103 year with liver cancer alive, pissing and shitting in a hospital bed, for an extra month.

This is the future for my generation and our children and their children. So when your parents tell you how they spent 3 lovely months driving around Australia, just remember, really, you paid for it. And your kids will be paying for it for a long while yet too.