Blame The Rich, Not The Boomers For Economic Inequality – OpEd
October 23, 2025
By Dean Baker
A recurring theme in policy circles over the last three decades has been that young people should blame their economic problems on older people
The idea is that rather than being concerned about the massive upward redistribution of income, which has made people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ridiculously rich, young people should blame their parents and grandparents.
The New York Times gave us the latest version of this story last week in a video segment titled “Thanks a lot boomers.” The write-up (sorry, I don’t have time to view the video) tells us:
Hey, boomers! Younger Americans would like a word.
We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?
In the Opinion video above, younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers. Like so many of us, they’re struggling with the high cost of education, a scarcity of affordable housing and a diminished American dream.
We live in communities that are still divided by race, in a nation burdened by debt, on a planet that keeps getting hotter.
We have one simple request: How about an apology?
Okay, let’s bring a little reality to the New York Times. First, the idea that the boomers lived through wonderful times is demented nonsense, not anything that corresponds to the real world.
There was, in fact, a golden age, but it predated the entry of most boomers into the labor market. The economy experienced a period of low unemployment and rapid real wage growth, which was widely shared, from 1947 to 1973. At the endpoint of this boom period, the oldest boomers were 27, and the youngest were 9.
After 1973, the economy took a sharp turn for the worst. The most immediate cause was the Arab oil embargo, which sent oil prices soaring. The economy at that time was far more dependent on oil than is the case today. Soaring oil prices sent inflation higher, which prompted the Fed to bring on severe recessions, first in 74-75 and then again in 1980-82.
The full story is more complicated and highly contested, but what happened to the economy is not. We had a period of far higher unemployment and stagnant real wage growth that lasted until the mid-1990s. The median real wage in 1996 was actually 4.4 percent lower than it had been in 1973.
The average unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20-24 over the years 1973 to 1988 (when the last boomer hit 24) was 11.3 percent. By comparison, it averaged 7.2 percent over the last decade, although it has been rising rapidly in 2025.
Real wages are substantially higher now than they were in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The real median wage in 2024 was 30 percent higher than it had been in 1980.
The increase should have been more. If the median wage had kept pace with productivity growth, as it had from 1947 to 1973, it would be more than 100 percent higher today than in 1980. The problem is that a larger share of income was diverted to high-end wages: CEOs, Wall Street types, successful STEM workers, and high-end professionals, like doctors, as well as an increased profit share since 2000, but 30 percent wage growth is not zero.
Anyhow, younger people should definitely have things better today than they do. But it is dishonest to say us old-timers are the problem, rather than the rich.
To start with, health care costs way too much. Suppose we got rid of patent and copyright monopolies, which redistribute over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household) from the masses to drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, software companies, and the rest. We can finance the development of drugs and medical equipment through upfront funding, like we do with the $50 billion a year we distribute through the National Institutes of Health. Then drugs and medical supplies are cheap, and healthcare costs far less.
We could also have universal Medicare, which would save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the administrative costs and profits of insurers. And, we could have free trade for physicians’ services, bringing their salaries in line with doctors in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries, saving us another $100 billion a year.
Boomers are not the reason we don’t have universal Medicare and free trade in prescription drugs and doctors. The lobbying groups for drug companies, insurers, and doctors are the reason healthcare is ridiculously expensive in the United States.
We also have the story of housing being extremely expensive, but here too we need to move beyond the lies. Housing costs had moved roughly in step with the overall inflation rate until the mid-1990s. Then we saw the take-off of a bubble, coinciding with the stock bubble, with house prices hugely diverging from rents and overall inflation.
While we built a huge amount of housing in the decade from 1996 to 2006, after the bubble burst and prices crashed, housing construction fell from a peak annual rate of almost 2.3 million to an annual rate of less than 500,000 at its low in 2009. Construction eventually picked up so that by the eve of the pandemic housing starts were running at 1.5 million annual rate, which was likely enough to meet new demand, but far below what was needed to make up a shortfall where we had seriously underbuilt housing for more than a decade.
NIMBYism surely slowed construction, but that could not have been the primary factor in the shortfall, since NIMBYism didn’t start in 2008. The main problem was the overreaction to the collapse of the bubble, with builders hesitant about new construction. This overreaction was what caused both rents and house sale prices to substantially outpace both inflation and wage growth. That is very clear in the data, but it is more popular in elite circles to blame boomers.
The best policy would have been to prevent the bubble in the first place. But the rich people who controlled news outlets were not anxious to say things about the housing bubble, even long after it should have been evident, because the financial industry was making money hand over fist pushing out bad mortgages. And when the mortgages went bad and the banks faced bankruptcy, they got the government to bail them out.
If younger people want someone to blame for high house prices, they should look to the financial industry and the failed regulators of the bubble era, most notably Alan Greenspan, but also Ben Bernanke, and Larry Summers. If they had taken steps to rein in the bubble, it likely never would have grown so large and led to such a disastrous fall in construction when it finally burst.
There is a similar story on climate. While many people, including boomers, can be blamed for driving gas guzzling cars and contributing to climate change in other ways, a big chunk of the blame surely must go to the executives of the fossil fuel companies. They deliberately misled the public about the dangers from climate change, pushing out false stories to hide the harm they knew they were causing. If the media, which is controlled by rich people, had been more effective in calling attention to these lies, perhaps there would have been more public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The story goes on, but the point is that it is dishonest to blame a generational grouping for the problems facing younger people today. The whole generation of baby boomers did not have equal power to influence public policy. A tiny elite had a hugely disproportionate ability to determine public policy and control the course of debate.
This article first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Since there is a lot of confusion surrounding the shutdown, I thought it would be useful to go over some of the main points as I understand them. I will not pretend this is a comprehensive account, but there are some issues that are reasonably clear.
First, when Republicans claim that they are proposing a “clean” continuing resolution, they are ignoring a trillion-pound elephant in the room. In the past, when Congress passed a continuing resolution, it meant that the money appropriated in the resolution would be spent on the designated items. Under Trump, this is no longer true.
Trump has decided that because he was elected with a huge mandate (almost as large as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016) normal rules don’t apply to him. He has decided to unilaterally refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
He has done this through two routes. The first is through the recission process. Under this process, Congress can vote to reverse appropriations that were made in prior spending bills. Under the rules of the Senate, a recission bill cannot be filibustered so it can pass with just 50 votes. This was the process that Trump used to eliminate much of the foreign aid budget, as well as funding for public broadcasting.
The use of the recission process strips the Democrats of the filibuster power they hold with normal appropriations. The process had rarely been used in prior decades because it effectively means undermining the deals that were made to get an earlier budget bill approved.
But the situation gets even worse with the newly invented “pocket recission.” With a pocket recission, Trump effectively just refuses to spend appropriated money and then tells Congress towards the end of the fiscal year, “What do you know, I never got around to spending the money you appropriated in this or that area.” Congress never gets a chance to vote since the fiscal year is reaching its conclusion. It would have to reappropriate new money in the next fiscal year if it wanted the money to be spent.
In the old days, this pocket recission likely would have been ruled unconstitutional, since it makes a mockery of Congress’s power to spend, but it’s not clear what this Supreme Court would say. At this point, Trump has gotten away with pocket recissions covering several billion dollars of spending. There is certainly no guarantee that he will not do pocket recissions again in the new fiscal year.
Trump’s recent decisions to “cancel” items like a train tunnel between New York and New Jersey would also fit into this category of pocket recission. The possibility of a pocket recission means that any deal on spending with Trump is pointless, since any time he gets angry about something he can totally ignore his commitment, sort of like his trade deals.
This is why it is disingenuous to say that what the Republicans are offering is a “clean” continuing resolution. If there is no commitment not to reverse appropriations through recission, and to prevent Trump from doing pocket recissions, Democrats cannot prevent any item in the continuing resolution from being subsequently cut. This means that they effectively have no control over the budget once the continuing resolution is approved.
The treatment and rules on recissions would ordinarily be the sort of thing that would be negotiated prior to the approval of a continuing resolution, but there were no negotiations. Speaker Johnson sent the House home shortly after July 4, in large part to avoid any vote on releasing the Epstein files, and Trump ordered Republican senators not to negotiate. There was only one negotiating session involving the Congressional leaders and Trump one day before the end of the fiscal year. When no agreement was reached, we got the shutdown.
The Republicans had obviously prepared for the shutdown. They immediately started screaming about how the shutdown was because Democrats wanted to spend trillions providing Obamacare to “illegals.” They knew this was a lie but apparently hoped they could sell it anyhow. (Undocumented immigrants do not qualify for healthcare coverage, except through a Reagan-era law requiring that emergency rooms treat anyone in need of care. This obviously is not the issue, since Republicans have not even proposed repealing this law.)
It seems they have mostly given up on the lie, which Speaker Johnson bizarrely claimed to have in writing, and instead are harping on how Obamacare has been a disastrous failure. This also flies in the face of reality. The share of the population that is uninsured fell from 18 percent in 2010 to around 8 percent at present.
More importantly, the ACA ended the ability of insurers to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. In the pre-ACA insurance market, people with serious health conditions, like cancer or heart disease, would have to pay ridiculous prices for insurance, or were unable to get coverage at all. The ACA changed this, requiring that all people within an age group were charged the same.
This change is a huge deal not only for the people who directly benefit by now being able to get affordable insurance, but really the entire pre-Medicare age population. In the pre-ACA world, most of the working age population got insurance through their employer. This meant that even people with serious health issues could get insurance in their employers’ pool.
But if a heart attack or some other health problem prevented them from working, they would be forced to get individual insurance as a person with a serious health condition. The ACA effectively provides insurance that people can get insurance.
The ACA also sharply slowed healthcare cost-growth. The cost of Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid in the years since the ACA passed came in far below projections. The Republicans are obviously hoping that people either do not remember or do not know about the state of the insurance market before the ACA. Few who do would want to go back to that world.
The other game that Republicans are playing is the claim that they would be happy to negotiate, once the Democrats pass the continuing resolution. This is a silly game, since there is zero reason to expect Republicans to negotiate in good faith, once the Democrats have no leverage. They had all summer and September to negotiate but refused to do so.
In fact, there is absolutely no reason they can’t negotiate now. In prior shutdowns both parties had no problem carrying on negotiations. Trump himself even negotiated in the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history. If there is some principle about not negotiating during a shutdown, the Republicans have just invented it now.
Anyhow, it appears the shutdown will continue until there is a major reversal of positions by one side or other. In the Democrats’ case, it would mean giving up any leverage they have on spending. In the Republicans’ case, it would mean agreeing to negotiate.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Still No Jobs Report, But the Labor Market Doesn’t Look Good
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump refuses to release the September jobs report. While the ostensible reason is the government shutdown that began October 1, two days before the scheduled release date, Trump could decide the release was an essential government function.
Also, according to Erica Goshen, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the release was almost certainly prepared and ready to go by the first. Ordinarily, the president would not see the report until the afternoon before the release, but Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about rules and norms. We can assume that he has seen the report, and based on its contents, Trump decided not to make it public.
Anyhow, without actually seeing the report, all we can do is speculate. But there is some labor market data coming from private sources, which do give us information.
A friend called my attention to the job listing firm Indeed’s index of job postings. It shows continuing weakening of the labor market.
While all of us have been saying that we are in a low hiring, low firing labor market, where there is little job turnover, that has been true since the spring. What is striking in this graph is that the listing index continues to move downward. The index for the beginning of October was more than 5 percent below the index number at the start of April.
This means that, in order not to have a deterioration in the labor market, we would also have to see a decline in the number of people quitting or being fired of 5 percent. That could be the case; there was a sharp fall in the number of separations BLS reported for August in the JOLTS data. (We don’t have September data.)
However, the monthly data are highly erratic. The average for the last three months (June, July, August) was less than 0.5 percent below the average for the prior three months (March, April, May). This would indicate little change in the firing/quit story to match the decline in hiring shown by the Indeed index.
We should be cautious about making too much of this index. It is useful, but it is just one piece of data, but we have to try to use what is available until Trump chooses to share the government data with the rest of us.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Dean Baker
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.
It is long past time to recognize this obvious fact. As long as we fail to do so, we will never be able to address the problem. I would also propose, as does the NYT boomer blaming piece, an apology from the rich. But as the old saying goes, being rich means never having to say you’re sorry.This article first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
