Baby Boomers making out like bandits as usual

Going4TheDream

Frogletina wrote: »

Let's not forget that women could not easily get HP either. My mother (working fulltime, and widdowed at a young age) was unable to take out a hire purchase agreement without it being guaranteed by a man, whereas my brother had no such problem.

Thankfully we have moved on from women being 2nd class citizens - the ability to earn and pay back something no longer being determined upon sex alone

JayBrun

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Boomers grew up mortgaging their childrens futures away so that they could have comfortable pensions, free education, lavish benefits, bumper public spending, secure unionised employment, and rocketing house prices. Meanwhile they guzzled up finite resources like oil, coal and gas like it was going out of fashion and filled up megatonnes of landfill with their thoughtless unrecycled waste.

At no point in the UK's history could any of the wealth they created pay for managing all this, so we, are left with the bill.

What precisely is it you want to learn from them?

ruggedtoast wrote: »

There is no solution other than for the boomers to give back some of the wealth they have stolen. They created an economy that revolved around burdening people who werent even born with ever increasing debts to pay for things that vastly benefited baby boomers and would be utterly denied to the people lumbered with paying their bills.

A the risk of incurring your derision, and that of others, the more you post the better idea I have of where you are coming from. I agree, in recent history many things were done that should have been handled very differently.

Most 'boomers' had little idea that the often accepted norm was short sighted and unsustainable.
I'm far from confident that had the current younger generation been around at the time they would have handled things differently.
No doubt you would regard that as irrelevant and still want your pound of flesh.

Similarly you may not accept the logic that excluding the really rich, who wouldn't engage you in conversation over this issue, most of the people you want to put things right are fairly ordinary folk.

They worked hard for many years and had a different approach to many in more recent years and to a much greater extent did save for what they couldn't otherwise afford and indeed for the future.

Some and particularly perhaps their children were increasingly seduced by the cheap credit and change in attitudes and everything became a bit of a free for all.

Intending no disrespect, I think nothing I can say will change or influence your views, but the idea of a generation doing what at the time any other generation would have done, making amends by giving up what in many cases they spent their lives working for isn't going to happen.

Have a go at the bankers and the politicians who should have known better by all means, but they will do little to help if it costs them money.

All very unsatisfactory I know but I'm not aware of an easy practical solution.

Unfortunately once the present crisis is over I'm not sure how different the approach will be because I fear the current generation will be equally as indifferent to the future they bequeath.

undetterred

Jimmy_31 wrote: »

Better get a house bought asap then hadnt i.

Or better still,stop b+llsh1ting on here.

CFC

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Boomers grew up mortgaging their childrens futures away so that they could have comfortable pensions, free education, lavish benefits, bumper public spending, secure unionised employment, and rocketing house prices. Meanwhile they guzzled up finite resources like oil, coal and gas like it was going out of fashion and filled up megatonnes of landfill with their thoughtless unrecycled waste.

At no point in the UK's history could any of the wealth they created pay for managing all this, so we, are left with the bill.

What precisely is it you want to learn from them?

You don't have a clue what life or society used to be like, just a fiery sense of being hard done by and a sweeping statement about the past.
You also have no clue about why the country is in the state it is currently.

I suggest you go back to school and try to learn something, because you're neither fit nor ready to be out with the grown ups.

oldvicar

Just for the record, the baby-boomers are the generation who paid down the national debt from 350% of GDP to less than 100% now.

There had of course been a bit of a war to make the debt so high in the first place. And we have only recently made the final repayment installment to America.

ruggedtoast

Boomers have grown rich, and old, by mortgaging their children's future with unsustainable, unmanageable bills for healthcare, pensions, public spending and a long, slow, banking fiasco.

It is simply reprehensible for boomers to sit smugly in their astronomically priced homes, having benefitted from free everything and blame the younger generation's credit profligacy on the banking crisis in 2007. An event which happened in national macroeconomic terms, around 3 days ago.

The economy was broken before that, for us anyway. Younger people were told to study hard, go to university, play the game as the rules were explained and we could reasonably expect what our parents got. Right?

Wrong. Generation X and Y walked slap bang into a golden generation who plundered the piggy banks of education and the nhs, and gleefully hoarded property thus inflating its price to extraordinary levels. Then we had our pockets picked trying to buy into this piece of the pie too. Something which could suddenly only be done by taking on vast amounts of debt enthusiastically shoved at us by a predatory and cynical financial regulatory system, mostly run and managed by... oh look boomers again.

The cupboards were bare.

Yet boomers can begin to make amends. How many young families live cramped in unsuitable terraces, dreading the next mortgage or rent payment, while over the street indolent empty nest boomers float around detached mansions that they could never at any point in their lives have been able to buy at todays prices, trying to find something to do with themselves, until they choose to make another killing by selling up and saddling themselves to the barely breathing over-burdened mule of the nhs?

Every retired couple must have their homes audited. For each empty unused room they selfishly hoard a fee of £50 - £75 per week must be levied, the proceeds used to fund social housing. For each new local development that is planned and voted down by selfish NIMBY boomer solipsists then this fee should rise by 20%.

If they choose to let the rooms out to a lodger then no fee is payable for that room, and if they give it to a homeless or a Guardian reader then they can receive a stipend from the government.

This would begin to solve the housing crisis and enforce a sense of moral responsibility that seems totally lacking from a large section of our most privileged demographic.

ILW

ruggedtoast wrote: »

The economy was broken before that, for us anyway. Younger people were told to study hard, go to university, play the game as the rules were explained and we could reasonably expect what our parents got. Right?

Wrong. Generation X and Y walked slap bang into a golden generation who plundered the piggy banks of education and the nhs,

That is where you are wrong.

The NHS is much better now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

The vast majority of boomers never had the opportunity to go to university.

In my experience, none of the boomers expected to be better of than their parents, they just got on with life.

The main difference I see from your rants is that you have a massive sense of entitlement that was not around in the past.

ceridwen

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Boomers grew up mortgaging their childrens futures away so that they could have comfortable pensions, free education, lavish benefits, bumper public spending, secure unionised employment, and rocketing house prices. Meanwhile they guzzled up finite resources like oil, coal and gas like it was going out of fashion and filled up megatonnes of landfill with their thoughtless unrecycled waste.

At no point in the UK's history could any of the wealth they created pay for managing all this, so we, are left with the bill.

What precisely is it you want to learn from them?

Ahem...thats not how we see it.

IMO - we had watched how things had steadily got better. We saw that the Victorian "ordinary person in the street" had had horrifically long work weeks, many of them living in slums, condemned to having child after child (whether they wanted to or no) etc. We saw that the end of World War 2 had brought the Welfare State - with NHS, etc. As far as we were concerned - Society had gotten a whole load better for ordinary people and was on a "steadily improving from here on in" trajectory.

So - you know what - we honestly thought that things were going to go on improving, the Welfare State was going to get better, the working week was going to get shorter, people would be able to look forward to retiring earlier (courtesy of mechanisation, etc).

So - dont blame us for this - the worst we were was naive (ie in thinking that way).

We honestly thought that History had stopped "going round in circles" - bad to good to worse etc etc etc. We honestly thought it would be a "steady march onwards and upwards" and that actually those who came after us would do even better than we had. We knew we were "standing on the shoulders of giants" and we thought that, in turn, succeeding generations would be "standing on OUR shoulders" and building on from what we had achieved.

We didnt know that hedge funders/bankers/going into what we understood would just be a "Common Market"/the next generation on from us funding so much of their spending with borrowing/the next generation on from us deciding to have more children than we did (ie because of getting paid more for having them!), Britain's borders being "virtually torn down" and letting in huge numbers of people, etc was going to happen. Any spending we did - then we thought we had earned the money and our incomes were getting better because the societal resources were being shared out more fairly (ie the rich were paying a pretty high rate of tax at one point in our time).

So - don't blame us. It simply isnt OUR fault (leastways not that of the "ordinary person in the street" - like most of us are/like I am personally).

ruggedtoast

ceridwen wrote: »

Ahem...thats not how we see it.

IMO - we had watched how things had steadily got better. We saw that the Victorian "ordinary person in the street" had had horrifically long work weeks, many of them living in slums, condemned to having child after child (whether they wanted to or no) etc. We saw that the end of World War 2 had brought the Welfare State - with NHS, etc. As far as we were concerned - Society had gotten a whole load better for ordinary people and was on a "steadily improving from here on in" trajectory.

So - you know what - we honestly thought that things were going to go on improving, the Welfare State was going to get better, the working week was going to get shorter, people would be able to look forward to retiring earlier (courtesy of mechanisation, etc).

So - dont blame us for this - the worst we were was naive (ie in thinking that way).

We honestly thought that History had stopped "going round in circles" - bad to good to worse etc etc etc. We honestly thought it would be a "steady march onwards and upwards" and that actually those who came after us would do even better than we had. We knew we were "standing on the shoulders of giants" and we thought that, in turn, succeeding generations would be "standing on OUR shoulders" and building on from what we had achieved.

We didnt know that hedge funders/bankers/going into what we understood would just be a "Common Market"/the next generation on from us funding so much of their spending with borrowing/the next generation on from us deciding to have more children than we did (ie because of getting paid more for having them!), Britain's borders being "virtually torn down" and letting in huge numbers of people, etc was going to happen. Any spending we did - then we thought we had earned the money and our incomes were getting better because the societal resources were being shared out more fairly (ie the rich were paying a pretty high rate of tax at one point in our time).

So - don't blame us. It simply isnt OUR fault (leastways not that of the "ordinary person in the street" - like most of us are/like I am personally).

I appreciate your candour, but I am afraid the homeless must still move into your bedrooms.

ILW

ruggedtoast wrote: »

I appreciate your candour, but I am afraid the homeless must still move into your bedrooms.

What homeless?

The only homeless I have seen appear to be either alcoholics or drug addicts. A lifestyle choice I suppose.