Author Argues Baby Boomers Are Destroying the Economy
Author Bruce Cannon Gibney argues American baby boomers are hurting economic growth.
In his new book, ‘A Generation of Sociopaths,’ author Bruce Cannon Gibney argues Baby Boomers have "betrayed America" and future generations will have to pay for Boomers' damage to the economy.
“My argument is about American Baby Boomers who were raised in a time of what seemed like [to] them to be effortless prosperity and that sort of conditioned them to believe that you didn’t have to invest in the future, that you could simply consume and that’s undermined the foundations of prosperity,” Gibney told the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney.
Gibney says Baby Boomers have had their biggest impact in the U.S. “The boom is largest and most powerful in the United States in part because the Boomers united around a single issue and this is what gives them such enormous political power and causes such economic problems, and that’s the maintenance of old age benefits in the United States which are not sustainable as is.”
According to Gibney, both the Republican and Democratic Parties have focused too much on spending. “Both modern parties are fiscally sort of radical in the sense that they have not cared at all about investment and they’ve only cared about spending. And that spending has overwhelming redounded to the favor of Baby Boomers.”
Gibney also says Boomers have influenced tax policy, leading to an expansion of the federal debt.
“Tax policy, which people have perceived as benefitting the top 1%-5% has overwhelmingly flowed to the Baby Boomers who do constitute a large portion of the rich, but the rich have paid an increasing share of taxes while the Boomer middle class has paid a decreasing share of taxes and that has been translated into the federal debt which my generation will have to bear.”
Despite Republicans making tax reform a priority, Gibney predicts a gloomy economic outlook if the federal government’s fiscal issues are not addressed first.
“If you want to get to a low tax environment, you’re going to have to deal with the fiscal situation first, because in the end if the deficit blows up, if Social Security tilts over, if Medicare is not brought under control, what you are certainly going to end up with is civil strife or an enormous tax increase.”