Cuppy I agree your post is excellent. Though I am of the Baby Boomer generation, NOT the first run of them who had the last accumulated wealth easily gotten in America back then. However, many of them are my customers today, and thus, how I am still able to make decent earnings in my business... Problems we see in our field though, is NO young males wanting to work with their hands or get into construction industry as a whole or learn Skilled trades like it once used to be decades back when I started...
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I was born in '62 so I am late stage baby boomer.
It was an illusion that this country won WWII. We actually lost it - though it took 30+ years for that to start SEEMING so. Those who were born in 1946 had the best of it all - they got to be young adults in a fantasy land due to the fact that the US was the only first world country not digging out of rubble and rebuilding its critical factories and infrastructure. Those early baby boomers got to enjoy a workers' economy the likes of which will never be seen again. They bought houses and mutual funds while the late stage boomers were just finishing high school. True, we were able to go to college cheaply and earn our way through it, but that was just about to end. Our competition was overseas and there was no internet to devalue work, so we had no competition for a good 30 years. (Though the factory owners were already making plans to offshore those factories...)
How did we lose WWII? well:
1. The temporary (and false) strong economy needed to create ways of attracting workers. Thus the corporate healthcare plan was born as a workplace benefit. Thanks to that, we have all-powerful healthcare lobbyists keeping the private insurance system (for-profit healthcare) in place. We could have had a fine single-payer system instead, if not for the circumstances of this unnatural economy.
2. Immediately after WWI, Eisenhower kicked the Interstate highway program into high gear. Who did he appoint to head it? The head of General Motors! What better way to create a demand for cars (and fuel to run them - $XOM) by tearing up perfectly fine inner city neighborhoods and trolley systems? Move automobiles into the category of mass consumption as a status item, and then keeping-up-with-the-Jones'-inspired planned obsolescence (with the help of Madison Avenue) would keep sales strong.
3. The politics of division that we now deal with are fueled by the disconnect between the people that benefitted this way and those who were harmed this way. The fact that neither side understands and appreciates the historical foundation of what "made America Great" means that WWII also poisoned our current politics. Not even to mention that this postwar circumstance was utilized to racial advantage as well.
So yes, the boomers at the beginning got a "first mover" advantage that the late stage boomers (and pretty much all who followed) cannot compete with, at least without a large inheritance.
