Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.

Kathryn: Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I’m Kathryn Anne Edwards, economist.

Robin: I’m editor Robin Rousey.

Kathryn: On this show, we believe the US economy can be better and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time. I’m already giggling because I guess that means the problem for today’s episode is baby boomers.

Robin: Baby boomers. It could be. The problem is whiny millennials who complain about baby boomers.

Kathryn: Cuts deep. Well, we’re going to talk about boomers and generations, but first, announcements.

Announcements

Robin: The only announcement I have is to remind people that it helps us out a lot if you rate the show on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen to the podcast on. If you want to leave us a written review, that’s also great.

Kathryn: Excellent. We also love reading funny reviews on the show. Remember Johnny Five, all of the compliments about how you guys are trying so hard—I have them filed away as the “bless her heart” file.

Robin: You have a file of them. Nice.

Retcon

Kathryn: After announcements, we move into Retcon for retroactive continuity, where we reflect and discuss and correct things that we said in past episodes. Robin, do you have a retcon?

Robin: I do. We were talking about the Trump accounts last week, and I said in passing that Michael Dell was going to give money out to all kids. I went to check that. Michael Dell has committed to giving out $6.25 billion to 25 million kids under the age of 10 if their family income is under $150,000. It’s $250 that he would put into their Trump account. So it includes a lot of kids who would not get that thousand dollars in the Trump account pilot program. I think he’s trying to create an incentive for people to create accounts who aren’t part of that pilot.

Kathryn: Good on him. I would prefer it if it came from the federal government and just automatically enrolled everyone. But I do like the idea of directly transferring wealth outside of the very wealthy. So good on you, Michael Dell.

Robin: I just wanted to make sure I was clear that it wasn’t just young kids and it wasn’t kids up to age 18 who can in fact open the accounts. It’s kids under 10, and if their family income is under $150,000.

Kathryn: I have one retcon about housing, which I don’t even want to talk about anymore. No more about housing. I don’t know how to say this except that I think maybe there are some people who listen to the show who really need to hear me say I’m wrong. That supply matters more than income and supply is really important, and supply will fix things. And they need to hear me say it because they won’t stop harassing me about it and sending me emails. I get one on my personal email. They need to hear me say supply will solve the problem. And filtering works really well. And if we build a lot of housing, even if it’s for rich people, it will help poor people.

Robin: Can we clip this and send it to them?

Kathryn: Let’s clip this part. You’re right, supply is the answer. I just don’t know what else to do to get people to stop calling me a stupid bitch in my DMs for pointing out that building a condo tower in every city in America is not going to make housing affordable. I think people want to believe that, but—

Robin: Well, it reminds me a lot of what you were saying about how people got supply and demand—that’s all they understand about economic forces. We talked about this in relationship to power, but it’s also true in relationship to these levels of income, and it’s not a one-and-done solution. I mean, I guess if you tripled the amount of housing and the population didn’t grow—

Kathryn: What predicts home prices in a locality is wealth. It is the top tail of the income distribution that predicts housing prices really well. And supply comes second. There’s lots of things we can do to make supply better or more ample, but it’s not clear that it would fix that problem. Now, I did talk to someone at a conference in DC last week who was very kind, who’s worked a lot on housing, and they said that whenever you talk about housing, you do have to carve out the California coastal counties, that they are different. California suffers from both the income problems and the supply problems in deep extremes—home to more billionaires than any other place on earth.

Robin: And it also has other constraints about building—for instance, lack of water in places. I was just up near San Luis Obispo and they can’t build houses there unless they find a way to offset the water use because they don’t have enough groundwater.

Kathryn: I was too cavalier about abundance and supply. There are lots of really good things that supply and abundance can do. I just worry that this supply train is rolling on through the station and everyone’s jumping on—we just need to build, we just need to build.

Robin: I know, and we just need to slash regulations and we just need to fix zoning. Those things can be true. They still may not be an adequate solution. Everything you think about housing being built and where it should be built is totally right. People who don’t like housing being built are often insecure homeowners who are terrified of their property going down in price, which a lot of people went through in the financial crisis and Great Recession. They’re afraid of losing an investment in their home, and they’re so tied to the money that they need to get out of their home that they’re antagonistic to anything that could possibly change.

Kathryn: All of those things can be true, but it is not clear that that is the salvation for affordable housing, especially if a lot of affordability is predicted by the preponderance of very rich people. So we’ll never talk about housing again. This is my last retcon. We’re never talking about housing.

Robin: We get tons of email. We’re really grateful for the housing episode. There’s so much to talk about with housing. I hope you do lots of episodes on housing.

Kathryn: No way. We are not talking about housing again. I do not want to solicit emails or DMs of people who explain to me that I’m stupid and I don’t know what I’m talking about because I said the evidence on filtering was relatively weak.

Robin: You have to just think, the podcast space tilts a certain way. It tilts male. It’s bro city. It took me a long time to realize that it’s a rare thing that you want to hear from people who disagree with you, even if it makes your brain crackle a little bit while you do it. And it’s hard. It’s hard for me to read the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

Kathryn: You actually read the opinion page? I don’t read the opinion page. I even skip over it so I don’t look at the headlines.

Robin: Not every day, and not every article. I read some of the financial columnists and the economics columnists at the Wall Street Journal, some of whom I think are very good. I have little patience for things that are badly done, badly argued, but I like to know how other people think. I may or may not agree with them. Maybe it’s just because I don’t really have super strong opinions on a lot of things, and so I’m curious what other people think. But it’s one of the things that made being an op-ed editor really fun.

Kathryn: The housing one is interesting because it’s agreeing on the problem but not necessarily agreeing on the solution. But then when you don’t agree on the solution, people think that you’re minimizing the problem, like you don’t care about the problem. And it’s not the same. I care a lot about this problem, which is why I don’t want to put all of our eggs in the “just build with fewer restrictions” basket. By not liking their solution, I’ve made it seem like I don’t care about the problem or that their problem doesn’t exist.

Robin: I could see it happening. This is an example of, you did not talk good on this one because the comments were so visceral. It had to be people feeling like you just didn’t care about the problem. I think that’s why the response was so negative. People don’t examine their own thoughts before they fire off an internet comment.

Kathryn: Well, maybe my retcon would then just be: I see you frustrated by arbitrary housing rules that you think aren’t necessary. I see you frustrated that there are homeowners in your town who would rather set themselves on fire than allow accessory dwelling units, or that you just need a little bit of density in your neighborhoods so that other people get to go to schools. I see you and I see that and I respect it and it is a problem and it is frustrating and it has consequences and we could build housing really differently in this country. I hope you will see me when I say that there is an argument that has relatively stable ground that the supply deficit of housing is overblown. It has motivations in being overblown, and it is a distraction from the degree to which income inequality is warping our housing market in a way that leaves half of America behind. This is going to feed really well into the main topic.

Robin: Let’s talk about boomers.

Kathryn: Okay, Boomer. So this was my idea. This is a plea: stop being so mean to me about housing and start being mean to me about boomers. Actually, don’t be mean to me—I’m still a person. All right, Terms and Conditions. Do you have anything?

Terms and Conditions

Robin: I don’t. Do you?

Kathryn: I wanted to go back to Calvinball. It was a term we brought up a few episodes ago—Calvinball, where you change the rules every time you play. I think Calvinball is a great way to think about where generations in the United States came from, as well as their monikers. It’s Calvinball. You change the rule with every generation. It’s pretty incredible. So Calvinball—we’re just doing a refresh before we get to our centerpiece.

Centerpiece

Robin: So for our main topic today, we’re going to talk about boomers and why people are so angry at boomers.

Kathryn: Answering the basic question: did boomers ruin everything?

Robin: Particularly the economy.

Kathryn: They’ve decided to vote all the economic resources we have into making more World War II movies and documentaries about Woodstock, and that’s going to become a third of our economy from here on out.

Robin: All right. Why did you want to do this?

Kathryn: One of the most formative books I have ever read in my entire adult life is this book called “The Myth of the Greatest Generation.” I don’t remember who recommended it to me. I don’t remember how I heard about it. I just know that I ordered this book and it is a social history of Americans during World War II. It is just jaw-dropping. The myth that you’ve heard of the greatest generation—the people who defeated fascism, made the world safe, and then they went home and had nuclear families and didn’t get divorced and all worked—it’s this myth of—

Robin: But not the women. The women didn’t work.

Kathryn: The women didn’t work, obviously, because they knew that staying home with their children was better and they had 2.5 of them. It’s very much this: you might not have ever had it written in a narrative that was three sentences long, but you know it. You know that Americans used to be better and now they’re not. That we used to be better at family. We used to be better at working. We used to care more about our country. And this book just says this is a complete mythology.

Robin: Of course it is.

Kathryn: If we are mythmaking from this greatest generation and making them into heroes that they weren’t, we are making boomers into villains that they’re not. That was why I wanted to do this episode, because there is someone who benefits from you deciding that someone else is to blame.

Robin: For sure, that’s always the case. So are you going to tell us a little more about the myth of the greatest generation?

Kathryn: They were named the Greatest Generation when almost all of them were dead in the nineties, when Tom Brokaw wrote a book about them. But before that, they were not called the Greatest Generation. So: one, highest divorce rates we’ll ever have—1945 and 1946.

Robin: They come back from the war.

Kathryn: Massive numbers of divorces. Two, lots of child abandonment and lots of abortion during the war. There’s a quote in here about how the public health commissioner for the city of San Francisco—which is a port city—he says that there are years in the war in which he thinks there are more abortions than live births in the city of San Francisco. There’s rampant cheating on partners. This is where Dear John letters come from. There’s a trade amongst soldiers in World War II to have pictures of naked women, so that if you do get a Dear John letter, you have smut to send back to your soon-to-be ex-wife or girlfriend. Incredibly high rates of desertion.

Robin: You mean desertion in the military?

Kathryn: Desertion in the military. People in the military just deserting, really high rates. And there’s also surveys of troops asking why are you here, and the most common response was they were drafted. And then we get into the race stuff of just how deeply racist this generation was. They bring up things like at a production site in Detroit where they’re making—it might have been an airplane facility, I don’t remember—anyway, a Black guy got a promotion and like 15,000 white people walked off the job. And there are race riots at this time. It’s a very ugly version of a time that we associate a lot of good things with. These were just people and a lot of them were racist. They weren’t perfect, and the author doesn’t say it to criminalize them. He’s just saying you don’t hear about this part. We’ve completely dehumanized these people into these saints to which we aspire, and we were never that. So who gains from you thinking that you’re a failure relative to people who never existed? Obviously, I’m excepting everyone’s grandpa who is clearly better. But those were the highlights of “The Myth of the Greatest Generation.”

Robin: Okay, so the boomers are their kids, right?

Kathryn: Yes.

Kathryn: So Calvinball—I brought this up in Terms and Conditions—the idea that every time you play the game, you make a new rule. That is definitely the case with generational titles. There is only one generation that has a name in the United States according to the Census Bureau and the Population Reference Bureau, and that is the Baby Boom, 1946 to 1964—18 years of extremely elevated birth rates. Goes all the way to 1964, so it’s not just they had kids the year they came home from the war. This is a longer period. After that, everything else is invented by either authors, columnists, or advertisers, and they’re invented for the purpose of storytelling.

I wanted to make sure to give a shout-out to those names that didn’t make it. You are a Gen Xer.

Robin: I am. I am a Gen Xer.

Kathryn: Okay, but you were also Baby Bust. This one’s my favorite: the Twentysomethings. Grunge kids. And the 13th Gen, before you became Gen X.

Robin: I remember 13th Gen. It’s funny that Gen X is the one that stuck.

Kathryn: Which one do you prefer?

Robin: I don’t know. I remember the Twentysomething cover of Time Magazine came out when I was in college, and everybody of course gets a little annoyed because it was a play on “Thirtysomething,” the TV show. As you say, they’re invented, but it did capture the experience of a lot of people my age—their parents got divorced, they were latchkey kids. None of those things were universal, but per our earlier conversation about feeling seen or not, I think in a way it did make me feel seen when I was 21 or 22. I do say Gen X, so I guess that’s the one I prefer.

Kathryn: I feel like Baby Bust is quite harsh.

Robin: It really was a big drop-off in population size, and we suffer politically for it.

Kathryn: But the consequence of that is you all would have been Busters. It would have been Boomers and Busters. I think Busters is actually—you could—there’s some power there to Busters. I am a millennial—1985—so no matter the definition of millennial I’m in it. We were Gen X Two, Gen Y, Echo Boomers, Digital Natives, the Net Generation, Nexers instead of Xers, and the Trophy Kids.

Robin: Ooh.

Kathryn: Gen Z has also been called iGen, MultiGen, and Homeland Gen.

Robin: Homeland Gen, because they were born after the creation of Homeland Security?

Kathryn: No, they were all just huge Claire Danes fans. I think I would have liked being either Echoes or Trophies, or Nexers. Trophy Kids is a comment on both our parenting and ourselves—that we got lots of trophies, but our parents gave us—

Robin: Oh, I was thinking like trophies, like being trophy wives.

Kathryn: No, but I think there’s that too, of how much emphasis is put into childrearing and the pressure on kids. Anyway, I don’t love “millennial” because I really struggle to spell it.

Robin: How many Ns, how many Ls?

Kathryn: It doesn’t come naturally to me.

Robin: It doesn’t roll off the tongue. So that was my—I want to do a little bit of Calvinball on: generations are not a thing. Someone makes them up for advertising purposes.

Kathryn: I read a really interesting article from the Population Reference Bureau about the reason why we have these generations—it’s to help with storytelling. It’s to give people an identity and to give an identity to a set of people whose experiences might be different, as a way to foster and catalyze storytelling. But I think there’s an aspect in which the story is wrong. When you’re young, let me count the ways millennials were mischaracterized in my youth. But I think there is a degree to which we don’t do as much asking what did we get wrong about the boomers. And so I wanted to talk about that because I think the boomers are presented as what’s wrong with the economy.

Robin: For sure. It’s interesting because I don’t feel like a lot of that conversation—I went back to read a bunch of articles. Did boomers ruin everything? Did boomers ruin the economy? A lot of them were written by boomers.

Kathryn: Yes, there was one in the Wall Street Journal that was like, “Congratulations, Boomers. You own America now.”

Robin: Robert Reich did a whole riff about boomers, and I take a lot of their point. But a lot of the anger really does seem to be millennials angry at boomers, at least recently. And I think—not that I want to bring it up—but I think a lot of it has to do with housing.

Kathryn: Oh, come on. Nope, we’re not doing it. Talk about something else.

Robin: Anyway, somebody wrote this, which is the dynamic of boomers waiting for millennials to say “you were right,” and the converse—millennials waiting for boomers to say “I’m sorry.” There’s a parent-child generational thing going on there, to which the Xers just kind of stand back, put up their hands, and go, “Okay, you guys have it out.”

Kathryn: There’s a great SNL skit about this where they make fun of all the generations and the host says, “Well, I’m an Xer. We just sit back and watch it burn.”

Robin: Exactly.

Kathryn: Fade into the background and watch it all come down. So the basic premise of “the boomers ate the economy and there’s no more for the rest of us” has a few features. One, they’re big and bad.

Robin: They’re big.

Kathryn: They’re big. Technically millennials are bigger now because enough boomers have died.

Robin: I saw that they crossed over boomers just a few years ago.

Kathryn: Very recent, but now millennials are the largest living generation—to the extent that you think that they’re a real thing. Also, what year did they end? That classification—

Robin: It’s true. You can make them bigger or smaller.

Kathryn: I can actually make millennials real big. It’s everyone born after 1965. So the boomers—they’re big, they’re bad. They came of age in the late seventies, early eighties when the US was going through a rough economy. But they got houses for cheap and dealt with really high interest rates, but then held onto those houses and now they’re all worth millions. They were the first to get exposure to 401(k)s and they rode the market to wealth and retirement. They benefited from a generous welfare state that they then dismantled in their wake. They benefited from a progressive tax system that they also dismantled in their wake to give a lot of tax cuts as they hit their prime voting years. Basically the boomer story is they’re going to benefit from government investment when they’re young and take it away from people as they get old and rich. And that is why boomers have ruined the economy.

Robin: The only thing I would add that you missed is the debt. All of this was financed with the national debt. So millennials are squeezed out of making any policy decisions now because all the money can only go to Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and the US military.

Kathryn: The spending on the elderly is an interesting one, too, because for me there’s this—who gains from making boomers the bad guys? Why do we have to make boomers into bad economic actors? So we’ll care less if we cut Social Security. I think that’s slightly conspiratorial, but the link to “they have so much money and the economy favored them and also they get Social Security and Medicare” is great foundation-building for “we shouldn’t have Social Security.”

Robin: The Wall Street Journal op-ed—I don’t know if it’s the same one—did exactly that. It started with all the things that boomers voted for and you think that it’s going in this direction of “we need to help millennials,” and then it just lands on “we need to cut Social Security.”

Kathryn: So the answer is to not have Social Security or Medicare because old people are mean and they had enough money on their own. I think the first things to say about this characterization that have to be said out loud is that you would not know from what we just said that there are Black boomers. That their economic trajectory is incredibly different from their rich, white brethren. I think you also wouldn’t know that there are poor people who are boomers—boomers that don’t own houses, that don’t have retirement accounts, who suffered from things like their pension was taken away, they never had access to a 401(k), and then their job was shipped overseas by the time they were 50. And a lot of the reason why you don’t hear about them is because a lot of them are already dead. We have picked a story and we have erased the people who don’t fit in it. That is problem one: you erase vulnerability, you erase diversity, and you erase the economic failings of a generation.

Robin: Well, you erase the people for whom that economy failed. There is a huge amount of wealth being held by the elderly in this country right now, and they need it. They saved for it. It needs to support them in their retirement. That’s what we told them to do.

Kathryn: The economic term behind this is called lifecycle savings. The idea is that you save up money while you work to dissave. We actually call it dissaving—I know it sounds kind of fun. In our context it sounds dry. We don’t spend, we dissave. But you basically—the wealthiest you are in your life is on the day you retire. You have at that point accumulated wealth and accumulated savings so that you can then draw that down and dissave until you die. And the idea of lifecycle savings is that all of the wealth that you build up is then depleted.

Robin: And what do economists find when they look at this?

Kathryn: It depends on who looks at it and when, but the general consensus—I’m afraid to say that now—I think it’s mostly lifecycle. Up until this point, there are very wealthy people who have handed down dynastic wealth, but there’s not a hundred million of them. I think there were 76 million boomers saving for retirement to the degree that they can, and some of them being quite successful at it, explains more of the wealth than just dynastic wealth. There are Bezoses and Musks and Gateses and Dells of the world. There are more billionaires now than there ever have been, but 70-plus million people saving for retirement is also a lot of money. And so the idea is that a lot of the wealth has been lifecycle. The reason why the Wall Street Journal says that they own America now is because a lot of them are right at the peak of their wealth because they’re either retiring or they have retired. For current reference, it’s 2026. So the oldest boomer is 80 and the youngest boomer is 62. You are getting a lot of people who are right at their peak wealth.

Robin: Right, their peak financially of contributing and not dissaving.

Kathryn: We would want them to have this money. But I do get the feeling that people are mad that they’re living long and spending it all and not spreading it around. I read this whole article about inheritance and that the new attitude among boomers is “spend it before you die.” You’ve earned this money. Enjoy it. And that of course, in this broad paintbrush with which generations get painted, it’s an extension of them being the “me generation.” Selfish and self-involved and all about living for the moment, don’t plan ahead—which of course, if they weren’t planning ahead, they wouldn’t have 80% of the wealth.

Robin: Accumulated quite so much wealth.

Kathryn: I think of this as—boomers are an example of there’s a lot that we can get right in our economy if we try. We can have a generation that has money, that has houses, that lives a long time and gets to go to—have you heard of Geezer World?—they get to go to a fun-loving elderly retirement community. Part of me feels like there’s almost a parallel to workers and unions. When you tell a low-wage worker at an awful job making the minimum wage, “You know what’s the problem? Someone out there is unionized and making good money”—that is not the beginning of the problem, that someone else is succeeding. It’s that you have been set up to fail. And so it’s easy to point to success as the problem and as the culprit when really it’s that someone has held you back. And I think that conflates with boomers—it’s their fault that you’re being held back, and also they’re really successful.

Robin: I think that the blame gets laid on them, and I’m not saying this is fair, because they were also in control of the politics. You’ve got multiple boomer presidents, but boomers dominating Congress. And the feeling is that it wasn’t just that they benefited from the programs, but then they also made these decisions. As you have talked about, these 25 years of tax cuts were voted on by largely boomer politicians.

Kathryn: Well, that one even makes me more mad, because that’s just a Republican policy. That’s not a boomer policy, that’s a Republican policy. And now they’re like, “Oh no, no, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Republicans didn’t pass tax cuts. Boomers did.” Don’t forget whose fault it is that we’ve absolutely decimated the federal budget for tax cuts to rich people. Your parents. I mean, I know it plays, but that’s wrong.

Robin: Right.

Kathryn: The political argument that boomers came into office and then made things more conservative gets painted because they’re all like very conservative, selfish “me” people who just want to eat up wealth, as opposed to—boomers are also quite liberal and there were lots of liberal boomers as well, including liberal boomer presidents. And if they tilted more conservative, your problem is still with conservatism, not with the people.

Robin: Right. We should probably blame Gen Xers who voted for a bunch of these Republicans because we were brainwashed by—I don’t know—Reagan in the eighties.

Kathryn: Okay, this is fair. I do think if we’re making a political argument, Xers are more—

Robin: We’re a problem. And it makes me worry sometimes about, you know, peak Xers were eight years of Reagan. It makes me worry about the people who are in that age now, growing up under Trump. What deep messages are being planted that will surface when they’re 40 and actually start to vote?

Kathryn: I don’t know. The difference is that people really love Reagan still. They always did. There’s a lot of idolatry around Reagan. You think there’s going to be mythmaking and idolatry around Trump?

Robin: I think there already is.

Kathryn: Oh, yeah. But I mean, that’s now. I’m talking about in 20 years.

Robin: You think it’s just going to fade away?

Kathryn: Oh, yeah. Because he’s a garbage human being, right? Sexually assaulting women and admitting it. Absolutely a fraud. A 35-time convicted felon. He’s a hateful person in his politics and he knows how to get people mad, but you don’t have a legacy being mad or destroying things. Legacy comes from hope and what you can build. He is not building anything. In fact, the only thing he’s building are the things he puts his name on, like Trump accounts, and that’s not going as well as he wants. And also they’ll take it away from him to make sure people can have it. I just think he is not going to make a legacy that’s positive. I think people view Reagan as having won the Cold War, of having taken control of big-spending Democrats, of having saved Social Security, of bringing honest fiscalism to politics after Nixon. And I don’t think you see a lot of young people out here or a lot of people amongst the boomers who are like, “You know who I love? Nixon.” You do not find people out there that are like, “Oh my God, Nixon. Those were the days.” Like you didn’t grow up in the Nixon era. It—the guy’s a disgrace. I think Trump’s going to go the same way. People love him now. He’s very good at manipulating hatred and playing the race card in an adjacent way, but that’s not long for a country that’s deeply optimistic and idealistic at heart. And his legacy will just get smaller and smaller over time, especially after he dies when people try to dramatically disassociate from him. That is my guess.

Robin: That’s optimistic.

Kathryn: Nixon actually gives me a lot of hope. He just does not have many defenders.

Robin: No.

Kathryn: Anyway, I don’t think that people think fondly of Nixon and Trump is our Nixon—worse on so many levels, but still a lying, greedy, insecure, narcissistic con artist. Sue me if you want for libel. What are you going to do? Come after my $25 million parent company?

Robin: Oh my God.

Kathryn: I mean, obviously I will laugh at boomer jokes. I will make boomer jokes. I will make them to my boomer mother with pride and glee. She knows me, believe it or not, and she understands that this is just what I’m like—quote unquote her sassiest kid. But I will never point to success of a large group of Americans and say, “That’s what’s wrong.”

Robin: Well, it does seem like an argument that sort of says because they succeeded, nobody else can.

Kathryn: And that’s not true. They succeeded and maybe we have to succeed in a different way, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have success or that their success impedes ours.

Robin: Right, because that is absolutely the argument that gets made.

Kathryn: But let’s make it really clear. Hold on. Did you just say housing again? Are you trying to trigger me? Really quick: You know why we don’t have a child tax credit that eradicates child poverty? Not Social Security. Why we don’t have universal Medicaid so every child in the United States has health insurance at least until they turn 18? It’s not Social Security. Why we can’t have childcare? It’s not Social Security. And I think this pitting one versus the other in a zero-sum world is a great way for you to forget that the reason why we don’t have these things is because Congress doesn’t prioritize them and they’d rather give a tax cut. And that is not a boomer policy. There’s nothing special about being born in 1955 that means that you are going to tear down investments in children. That is a conservative Republican policy—that it is not the government’s job to help people. And spoiler alert, if they had been successful in 1983, they would have ended Social Security.

Robin: You are saying that in 1983, the last time we revamped Social Security when the trust fund was about to run out of money, the Republican plan was really just to get rid of it.

Kathryn: I mean, the more relevant reference would be they tried to privatize Social Security in the Bush administration. He had a plan to privatize it, to change basically the entire aspect of Social Security, and it failed. And I think that now the success of Social Security is held up as a problem for every other avenue.

Robin: Everything does come back to Social Security with you.

Kathryn: It does, doesn’t it? But I think the conflation of conservatism with baby boomers does conservatives a favor because you blame your parents and it becomes less about tax policy choices and more about people.

Robin: I also feel like it absolves the current generation from taking action, from running for office, advancing policies, voting in numbers. You just keep reading “this will be the year that the younger people vote.”

Kathryn: The cynicism and resignation are a free pass for bad policy.

Robin: They give bad policy a free pass.

Kathryn: Yes. “Oh, we’ll never be able to change anything because of the boomers,” and so there’s no point in voting. That’s a very different story from “you are empowered, you can make a difference, we can have different policy environments.” But that’s only if we don’t get brought into these narratives of “remember old people a long, long time ago in the greatest generation, they were great, and then people old now, they’re evil.” Like, forget that. Just raise taxes and pay for children’s investments.

I wanted to end with a quote that for me encapsulates the boomer argument. The former head of the UAW, Walter Reuther, was an absolutely formative labor leader in the US. Multiple assassination attempts on him. He was vital in not only growing the power of the UAW and then the AFL-CIO, but using labor’s voice in the civil rights movement and in the United Farm Workers movement. He spoke on the 1963 rally—the I Have a Dream Rally. He was one of the people that spoke before King. And he said—I think it was in the forties or fifties—“Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the pie. We’re fighting for a bigger pie.”

Robin: Hmm.

Kathryn: It’s a really simple quote, but it has stuck with me in so many ways. This is going to sound so dumb, but when it’s a pie fight—boomers have too big a slice of pie—millennials, we need a bigger pie. We don’t need to take their slice. We just need a bigger pie, and we need policies that fight for a bigger pie. And I carry that with me through these types of discussions of “here’s what’s wrong with boomers.” And then, like, can we just go back to making fun of them for being obsessed with World War II?

Robin: Well, I think that the problem with the bigger pie metaphor in this day and age is that the bigger pie just keeps getting sucked upward to the wealthiest, and that the boomers embody that. But I think your point is right and it’s a nice note to end on.

Kathryn: No, but I think that the pushback is important, right? My problem is that however big the pie gets, I’ll never get more.

Robin: Yeah, the pie is going to service the national debt no matter how big it gets.

Kathryn: I genuinely think if we just had a few different choices in our tax policy, we could make investments in children and in the workforce that would actually grow the pie. And I don’t talk about housing, but if you want to know a really morbid thought, I actually know where about 15 million homes are going to come from in the next 10 years. And those are the ones that boomers vacate when they die. The secret supply argument that no one wants to talk about, which is very morbid and I don’t celebrate it, but the highest home ownership rates in the United States are amongst a group of now 70 million people that will not be on this earth more than likely in the next 15 years. So if you really care a lot about supply, just wait. But it never comes up in the supply discussion—what is the relative housing stock over a 10-year or 15-year trajectory? Given the changes of the actual size of the population and home ownership rates by demographic, by age cohort groups, we actually have a big release of supply coming.

Robin: It’s interesting that we haven’t figured that part of it out. People aren’t downsizing out of their houses because we have put policies in place that discourage it.

Kathryn: Or they don’t want to and they like their house. Or they like their house where it is. And maybe I live in a house that’s too big, but that’s also okay. I don’t want to create an economy where when I turn 60, someone tells me I’m not allowed to live in the house that I live in because that’s what young people need. I get to live in my big piggy house. I’m an American, I get to do what I want. And that is not why you don’t have a house. And then I’ll die and someone else gets my piggy house and the circle of life continues.

Robin: Your children can fight over your piggy house—or cleaning it out, which is really what they fight over.

Kathryn: I have filled my piggy house with so much stuff that you will have to go through.

Robin: I can’t even tell you how close that cuts.

Kathryn: I should say that I have cleaned out the house of a very beloved person after they died, and it was a brutal process. I cleaned out my childhood home when my dad died. So that’s one more house in the suburbs, people.

So we’re going to take a quick break. A whole lot happened there. Robin and I are still working through a lot of feelings that come with hosting a show that tries to be positive about the economy in 2026. And sometimes you throw your hate at us and it doesn’t really put us in a good place to talk about optimism. In addition to me getting lots of comments about how dumb I am, Robin has also gotten some comments. And you know what, when you say bad things about me, my feelings get hurt. When you say bad things about my friends, I burn down your home. And that’s where we are anyway.

Executive Orders

Robin: All right. We like to end the show with Executive Orders. Robin, what’s yours?

Robin: This is really petty, so I feel—

Kathryn: Oh my God, yes. I’m here for it. Stop. I need to get popcorn and then go.

Robin: I’ve just had it with people and their dogs. If there is a sign at the park that says no dogs in this park that doesn’t mean you and your dog with your Frisbee are exempt from that. I live in a neighborhood with a dog park and a quarter mile down the road is a park that literally says no dogs in this park. And I looked in it the other day and there were like five people playing with their dogs. Go to the dog park.

Kathryn: Go to the dog park.

Robin: Go to the dog park. I can’t decide what the fines would be if it was my executive order, but it’s just short of you lose your dog.

Kathryn: We have a dog. I love my dog. She’s so sweet. And yeah, I’m also like—dog owners, be better.

Robin: Be better. Do people bring dogs into the grocery stores where you live? People bring dogs into the grocery store and I’m like, on what planet do you think that that’s an acceptable behavior? Nobody in Spokane took their dogs into the grocery store. This is an L.A. thing that just is like, oh, people.

Kathryn: This is an LA thing. What I love about dog owners almost all the time is just how much enthusiasm they have for their dog that sometimes blinds them to how inconsiderate they’re being. But dogs do make the world better, and we fundamentally believe that here on Optimist Economy, which is why we’ll send a free dog to any spiritual sponsor.

Robin: I hope you can match that in pettiness.

Kathryn: I was going for my usual takedown of Hollywood, that we need prestige drama about Walter Reuther in the mid-century labor movement. Oh my God, does this guy need a Netflix miniseries? If you’ll shell out for six or seven seasons about the British royal family, can we give some treatment to the working class in the US? I would watch six seasons about the labor movement in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Do not spare any expense on costume. Here’s a tidbit: he survived his assassination attempt in his home, barely. They shot him with a shotgun through the window at his kitchen sink. And the only reason why he didn’t die is because he was turning to talk to his wife. So he got hit—instead of getting hit full on in the chest, he got hit in his right arm.

Robin: Oh my gosh.

Kathryn: He really struggled to use it for the rest of his life. So if you met him, he introduced himself with his left hand because he couldn’t move the right arm because of all the shotgun pellets in there. And then not that much later, a similar attack was made on his brother, who also survived. And the FBI was like, “Sorry,”—this is Hoover’s FBI—“these are liberals. We don’t investigate those crimes.” Yeah, it’s like, it’s not a real crime if you try to kill a liberal. Coretta Scott King spoke at his funeral and gave one of the eulogies. We have these titans of American history who don’t get the same treatment as the British monarchy.

Robin: I know. More American stories. And I’m with you. I think that would be Walter Reuther. Who would you cast as Walter Reuther?

Kathryn: Oh, that’s a great question. Obviously I have a lot of thoughts on casting. He looks like he’s from the forties.

Robin: Exactly. You could have cast him in the forties.

Kathryn: Okay. You know who this guy actually looks like? Bill Pullman. His son is an actor named Lewis Pullman. And I think Lewis Pullman could pull off a mid-century face. I’m thinking Lewis Pullman as Walter Reuther. Now here’s a real question. Look up John Lewis, labor leader. He was the head of the United Mine Workers. Look at this guy’s visage. Who plays him?

Robin: A pair of eyebrows plays him.

Kathryn: I mean, you need eyebrow wigs for this one.

Spiritual Sponsors

Kathryn: Okay, spiritual sponsors on this episode about the boomers and people who don’t know how to walk their dog. Who is your spiritual sponsor?

Robin: Actually my spiritual sponsor—I’ve been thinking about this for a while—is my baby boomer friends who are a few years older than me and who, especially in the last few years, have given me kind of great advice about things. I’m an oldest daughter, so I don’t have an older sister, and they have all really filled that gap for me.

Kathryn: Oh, that’s such a good sponsor. I’m coming back again with the Olympics.

Robin: You are. By the time this airs, it’ll be like World Cup season, but.

Kathryn: Then they need to be reminded. My spiritual sponsor, once again, is the Olympics. I had one of the most—that thing that you wish would happen in a high-stakes sports moment—I was in a public place, I was in an airport, and I have this very formative memory of being at an airport during the Michael Phelps relay race in Beijing in 2008. People weren’t getting on the plane because the race was on, and people were shouting from the gate, “Go!” And it was amazing. And then he won, and then we boarded and had to be on an airplane. But it was really great to have that sense of community. So I was at the airport and I watched the US women win hockey in real time and heard throughout the terminal just hollers when that amazing witchcraft of a play went in. And that was a very special moment. So my spiritual sponsor is whoever shouted “#### yeah!” in the terminal when that shot went in. That is my spiritual sponsor.

I know that at least one of our production staff was highly vested in the game, to the point that if it had played at a different time, we would have had to move recording. So Sofi LaLonde is an amazing women’s hockey fan and edits the Optimist Economy podcast, and Andy Robinson creates our online videos that you can see on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Snapping to the two of you.

Robin: Of course. Thank you to everyone who donates to keep those two paid. You can donate if you’d like to become a sponsor of our show at any level that is comfortable for you. You can do that at optimisteconomy.com. And if you’re interested in chatting with other optimists, we have a chat going on Substack, so if you just become a follower of our show on Substack, you can talk to them in the chat room. That’s it for our show.

Kathryn: That’s it.

Robin: That’s it.

Kathryn: I don’t know what the heck else we can do.