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Millennials and Zoomers Inherit a Boomer Mess, What Will They Do With Their Turn?

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36 comments on Millennials and Zoomers Inherit a Boomer Mess, What Will They Do With Their Turn?

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Move Over Boomers

In response to Social Security Will Not Be Able to Pay Promised Benefits by 2034 a reader asked “What is the most likely outcome of the most likely ‘solution’? At what point will pretending break down, and what will the consequences be?“

I answered in a Three-Part Tweet.

  1. Excellent Questions: Much depends on what the Progressives can get passed by the end of the year. I assume income and corporate taxes will rise, but by how much? What about energy taxes? Those answers may decide whether its stagflation or deflation.
  2. Then Millennials and Zoomers replace Boomers in Congress. What then? The M’s and Z’s have a lot of scorn for the B’s. Normally I am willing to take a political educated guess. My election calls have been pretty good, but I really just do not know.
  3. One way or another, I am firmly convinced the stock market will not like the outcome no matter what the M’s and Z’s decide. These imbalances cannot last even if we cannot see the precise path. Meanwhile, I remain in awe of the Fed’s ability to keep these bubbles going.

Average Age of Congress 

Please consider How Old is the 117th Congress?

  • The average age of the 117th Congress is 59 years old and the median is 60 years old. This is much higher than the median age of 38 years in the United States in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 
  • The average age of the Senate is 63 years. The most popular years of birth are 1952 and 1954 with seven members each.

Oldest Senators 

Purple Shift

In addition to aging Senators who will retire or die in office, there’s an ongoing “Purple Shift” in Southern States as noted by Nate Silver. 

Biden won these two states in large part by improving upon Democrats’ performance in each state’s metro area. For instance, he won Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and usually makes up 60 percent of Arizona’s total vote share, by 2 points. He also surged in the Atlanta metro area, improving on Clinton’s margin in the 10 counties that make up the Atlanta Regional Commission by 9 points, enabling him to win Georgia. Biden was also aided by the fact that both of these states are more racially diverse than states in the Upper Midwest.

Part of that was an anti-Trump backlash but part of it was younger voters tend to be more liberal.

Spotlight Texas

In both states, Biden did better in the more diverse and well-educated major metropolitan areas, but that proved insufficient. However, he still made some gains. In Texas, for instance, Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Tarrant County (Fort Worth) since 1964, and in North Carolina, he improved on Clinton’s margins in the two most populous counties in the state, Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh). He even carried some suburban and exurban counties that Trump won in 2016, such as Williamson County outside of Austin, Texas, and New Hanover County, North Carolina (Wilmington).

Once again, some of these shifts are due to demographics and immigration, while part was due to huge anti-Trump turnout. 

Priorities, Priorities 

Millennials and Zoomers do not have the same priorities as their Boomer parents and grandparents. 

In general, M’s and Z’s they care more about the environment, are more liberal, and are far less addicted to automobiles and warmongering than boomers. 

In less than a decade, they will be in control, calling all the shots on climate, taxes, Social Security, spending, energy, and wars. 

They have far less to protect in the stock market.

The Path We Take

The M’s, the Z’s and the Purples will decide what’s next. But when?

Biden is pushing a $3.5 trillion progressive agenda. We still don’t have an outline. 

Sooner or Later? 

That’s the key question right now. Will it pass? What will be in it?

I do expect Democrats will lose control of Congress in the Midterms. 

If so, Biden has a one-time-for-now shot at passing something. So what will Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kristen Sinema be willing to go along with? 

Longer term, the fate is sealed. One look at the Purple shift in Texas is all you need to know. 

Stagflation or Deflation?

I can easily make a case for either, or both, or one right after the other.

Case for Stagflation

  • Biden passes a massive energy tax coupled with “free education” and “free” child care. 
  • This results in higher prices across the board for everything. 
  • In response to higher prices, the demand curve shifts in causing a recession. 
  • Yet, escalating energy triggers through 2030 stubbornly keep prices rising. 

Case for Deflation

  • The stock market bubble bursts reducing demand for houses, cars, purchases in general. 
  • Prices fall as a result of falling demand. 

Recession Assumptions

Neither Biden, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, nor economists see any recession on the horizon. 

Both of the above scenarios imply a recession. 

Regardless of which one, the notion the Fed or Congress can prevent recessions is laughable. 

Bubbles do burst, with consequences.

Another recession within a decade is coming. And one next year in response to a Biden budget would not surprise me in the least. 

For more discussion on the stagflationary case, please see …

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Mike Shedlock

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36 Comments
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Trevor
Trevor
5 years ago
About 20 years ago a GenXer said that her generation can’t seem to get along with anyone; they loathe Boomers & despise Millennials while arrogantly believing they are God’s gift to mankind. After reading this article and watching Obama’s generation destroy my country (don’t kid yourself, Obama is a solid GenXer), I’d say the author’s basic premise is correct only if you include GenXers astounding ability to single-mindedly pursue incompetence. But Dr J D Unwin beat the author by 90 years. Though Unwin was a self-professed progressive academic who believed sexual oppression kept societies in states of backwardness, his extensive anthropological research revealed otherwise. He found to his chagrin that a society will destroy itself in 3 generations if the first generation’s men lose their sexual moral foundations by not fully focusing their male sex drives towards their own wife with the purpose of forging his marriage and fathering his children. If that happens with Generation 1’s men, then the next generation’s men will view marriage as a partnership of ‘equals’ allowing (forcing) women to shoulder a man’s responsibility producing angry and resentful women; Generation 2 will have very few children. The 3rd generation will raise astonishingly weak men who mostly don’t see themselves as men where each knows he needs his own wife for the society’s survival. Though there will be some men in Gen 3 who will attempt to return to the man’s inherent patriarchal responsibilities, it will be too late to prevent the inevitable: the nation’s collapse from within that allows for the viciously violent invasion of external men who know equality is in reality bad math. The land is as well as its men. Our men are terminally ill.
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Webej
Webej
5 years ago
Political leaders and the owners of wealth have always been disproportionately older (the ‘elders’), so not sure if we are seeing big changes there.
In terms of political color, perhaps the map will not color blue if the political duopoly were to shift. High time.
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amigator
amigator
5 years ago
Reply to  Webej
Generally a good statement but I doubt the politicians before this generation retired as multi-millionaires!
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Carl_R
Carl_R
5 years ago
Reply to  amigator
Consider that when the US was founded, elected officials were unpaid. The stated reason was to prevent the creation of a political class. The idea was that, if the officials were unpaid, they would serve only as a civic duty, not as an occupation, and that they would only serve a single term or two. That didn’t last long. The reason given for changing it is that if elected officials were unpaid, they would be more apt to accept outside remuneration (bribes, contributions). Given 200 years of experience, it would seem that even if you pay them richly, they still take outside remuneration, or take advantage of information learned in their position in order to inside trade. I’m not sure there is any solution.
For what it’s worth, at the state level, legislators do not earn a lot. The average pay for legislators varies widely by state, with most states between $17-21,000/year, but at the other extreme, New York pays then an average of $92,120. I doubt these figures include pensions.
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
5 years ago
If the milzooms were literate to any meaningful degree, first things they would do is, with a raised middle finger, tell anyone expecting them to waste their lives toiling away to repay what the boomers borrowed and wasted, to go stuff it and starve.
Then they’d get busy getting rid of the institutional cancers which boomers either created, or did nothing to get rid of. Starting with The The Fed and the idiocy that the founders were somehow “wrong” about a dollar represented $20. None of which were even ever intended to serve any other purpose than allowing connected, utterly useless, boomers to live high off of robbing everyone else.
Having spent generations being indoctrinated by the beneficiaries of said institutions of nothing but theft; I somehow doubt about the little Boomlings’ ability to read, though. So, continued mindless regurgitation of illiterate drivel, is more likely from that front.
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jiminy
jiminy
5 years ago
Boomers love their wars?  I can tolerate almost any opinion I don’t agree with except hypocrisy.  These are the draft dodgers from my generation who now support an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy.  Chicken hawks turn my stomach, I’ll take the newbies any day.
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Anon1970
Anon1970
5 years ago
There are consequences to going to war. Wars are expensive. The GenXers, Millennials and Zoomers will be paying for the Middle East wars either directly through higher taxes or indirectly through inflation. The Boomers will not be getting off Scott free, but the older ones are about to ride off into the sunset. We the people elected the politicians who took the country to war and didn’t bother to raise the taxes to pay for it. In addition to the 2001 tax cut that was not cancelled, Congress approved more tax cuts in 2003 at the request of Bush43.  Just because the troops have left Afghanistan, it does not mean that war related expenses will not keep piling up. There are hundreds of thousands of wounded/disabled veterans that will be collecting disability and medical benefits for decades to come.
Our political system needs a major overhaul but I doubt that the country will get one anytime soon. 
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
5 years ago
Reply to  Anon1970
“Our political system needs a major overhaul but I doubt that the country will get one anytime soon. “
Once-were empires keep decaying, until they can no longer avoid getting sacked from the outside. Which is why, as un-PC as this may sound: The jihadis are on our side. Enemy of my enemy and all.
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Doug78
Doug78
5 years ago
I am looking for signs that the Millennials and Zoomers will make new and innovative mistakes than the ones the Boomers made but frankly till now I see them as following in our shoes. Maybe with Humanity there truely isn’t anything new under the sun. 
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fiat124
fiat124
5 years ago
Gen X being forgotten/ignored as usual
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Felix_Mish
Felix_Mish
5 years ago
All this talk of a “Boomer Mess” is total BS.
There has not been a better time in history for either the US or for the human world in general.
People in the US walk around with multi-hundred dollar phones in their pockets and live in the best housing the human race has ever created.
We eat unlimited supplies of excellent food in season or out.
High quality clothing is close to free.
Transportation is so close to free that hitch-hiking has essentially disappeared. Multi-car households are the norm! People own vehicles as much for ornamentation as for transport.
For a monthly fee of about a day’s work for the lowest paid of us, we can listen to more music than a person can physically hear in our lifetime. Ditto, movies. Ditto, books. And that monthly fee also pays for education/learning resources unequaled by any time in history. And, it pays for the ability to communicate instantly with almost anyone, worldwide, at any time.
And the list goes on.
Teachers and the media can create a convincing atmosphere of lies. I’d wager that even among MishTalk readers many think that more people in the world are bad news. Like the horrible turn the whole world has taken since those blissful, bountiful, beautiful times of Thomas Malthus. When people were scarce, not numerous as in such times as today.
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kurtellis
kurtellis
5 years ago
Reply to  Felix_Mish
cheap junk food, ample parking, and a smart phone. that’s maybe enough to satisfy some but the big ticket items that really count? Housing, Health care, child care, education cost keep growing at eye popping absurd levels year after year. the opportunity to get in now and amass wealth is about nil for large swaths of the population. wealth inequality has never been higher in the history of this the USA
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
5 years ago
Reply to  Felix_Mish
“….and live in the best housing the human race has ever created.”
Anywhere people prefer to live, almost all houses were “created” decades ago. Surprising as this may sound: Wall Fungi doesn’t add value to them over time. Despite that surprising revelation: Do you reckon “the average American” is closer to, or further from, living in Pelosi’s decaying shack now, vs back when it was built?
Also, some soon-to-be-eaten schlub in Idi Amin’s Uganda, had potential access to better telephones than than Louis XIV. Seems like a strange metric for how well off someone is.
Transportation, aside from by air, was just as cheap back in the late 60s. At least. The decline in hitch hiking having more to do with today’s hitch hiking demographic being 1)aborted, or 2)can’t afford to stay anywhere they might catch a ride to, since the sole all-overiding goal of America is now simply to facilitate a small cadre of boomers (and their dilettante offspring) living off of usury while the totalitarian state ties everyone else into destitute bondage and de facto slavery.
Listening to infinite variations on repetitive bleeps through cheap plastic thingies stuck into ones ear canals, isn’t in any strict sense an improvement over Sinatra singing live all day at a music hall down the street. Ditto availability of live music in general; from Rubinstein, Heifetz and Callas and on down to local crooners.
The fact that the average 1930’s Russian had access to a few technological advances compared to their stone age forebears, did not make the gulags just a-ok. Nor mean that being stuck in one, was some sort of an improvement over freely hunting Siberian Mammoths, even if only with stone spears, rather than the latest in 1930s weaponry.
As Acton reminded us, it is Liberty which is the highest goal. Not cellphone power. And Liberty is a declining function of both relative difference in effective power between you and those who “govern” you, and of your de facto indebtedness. Neither of which are anywhere near some sort of all time low.
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ColoradoAccountant
ColoradoAccountant
5 years ago
“In general, M’s and Z’s they care more about the environment, are more liberal, and are far less addicted to automobiles and warmongering than boomers.”  I remember anti-war riots in the 60s.  They then eliminated the draft and used only mercenaries.  That quieted down the soccer Moms and stopped the anti-war riots.  Bring back the draft, male and female, then watch the riots begin.
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Bam_Man
Bam_Man
5 years ago
Looking ahead, the M’s and Z’s are about to set policy. What will it be and what are the implications?
ClownWorld on steroids. Or acid. Or both.
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TexasTim65
TexasTim65
5 years ago
Us poor Gen-Xers. Sounds like we are never going to come to power. We still haven’t had a president from our generation and yet we are the ones who should now be at the peak of our political power.
I wonder how much Millennials and Zoomers will change once they start inheriting wealth from their Boomer and Gen-X parents. There is a lot of wealth going to be transferred downwards in the next 10-15 years and history says once you get wealth by any means you don’t voluntarily give it up. That’s why people tend to become more conservative money wise (not necessarily moral wise) as they age.
I’d love to see one of the 2 parties transform into a Fiscally Conservative and Morally Liberal party.
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Bam_Man
Bam_Man
5 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
President Camacho will be the first one from your generation.
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Felix_Mish
Felix_Mish
5 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
Hey, wait, you’ve had Obama!
(Yeah, yeah, ’61 is before ’64. But really? No way can a baby boomer be born in the ’60’s, even if “the 60’s” were really from 65 to 75.)
Boomers have only had Clinton/Bush.
Or yet another way this last pres election was weird. Couple of pre-boomers. In the year 2020? Not 1980. Not even 1992. 20 frigging 20. Whoa, Nelly! I still say this election was the US’s Andropov Moment.
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Felix_Mish
Felix_Mish
5 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
Ron DeSantis was born in 78. Young end of GenX.
Checking that, I also checked Andrew Cuomo, born in 57. Boomer. But, get this: His ex-wife’s name is listed in Wikipedia as – I’m not making this up – “Kerry Kennedy”. Really. OMG! It’s a country of inbreds happening before our very eyes!
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strataland
strataland
5 years ago

The Millennial movement toward socialism while misguided has
another side. The Power Generation bears some responsibility. How many times
have you heard the saying? “We’re mortgaging our kid’s future.” We’ve saddled
youthful generations with a $22 trillion national debt; forced them to buy
healthcare insurance to spread the risk; left them with sky-rocketing tuition resulting
in enormous student debt; left ballooning and nearly incalculable unfunded
pension obligations for Federal, State, local governments and public safety
officials; and they can’t afford a home.  Is it any wonder, with all of these obligations unwillingly foisted upon
them that they might feel as though something in our current government
structure is amiss? One could argue that their current situation is a form of
socialism forced upon them by their predecessors. The foregoing doesn’t justify
a movement from capitalism to socialism by any means, but, it does deserve
inclusion in the debate and solution. 

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Curious-Cat
Curious-Cat
5 years ago
Not mentioned in the case for deflation is the declining birth rate. An economy needs increases in population and/or productivity in order to grow. The US fertility rate hit an all-time low in 2020 – it declined 4% from 2019.
The statistical replacement rate is 2,100 births per 1,000 women of child bearing age. But in 2020, the US total fertility rate fell to 1,635.5 births per 1,000 women. An economy cannot grow with a consistently shrinking population. It is no doubt why Angela Merkel sought to have so many middle easterners immigrate to the EU. Their situation is even worse.
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Carl_R
Carl_R
5 years ago
To be fair, boomers inherited problems and deficits from their parents, too, but made them worse, particularly in the last 20 years. I would feel sorry for the generations behind the boomers, but based on their policy preferences, it would seem they they will make things worse, not better. In my opinion, they will be the generations that decide the new government that will take over for the Republic we have had for 250 years, but which has grown very long of tooth.
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Eddie_T
Eddie_T
5 years ago
Tarrant County flipping to Biden was pretty huge. It’s always been very much a Republican lock. I expect some of the Biden flip was really the “anybody but Trump” vote, but the growth in DFW does seem to be pushing the area to the left over time.
The thing that’s hard to reconcile about a “purple shift” in Texas is….the state legislature….which is somewhere to the right of Mussolini.
The Governor is far right. The Lt. Governor (who runs the state Senate) is a Rush Limbaugh wannabe who says some of the most racist, sexist, xenophobic things you’re ever likely to hear said in public……, and he probably wraps himself in the flag and talks to the Lord personally in private. He’s a piece of work.
So..if we’re going so liberal, how did these people win office? …and the entire lege is controlled by the far right. Lots of donor oil and coal (Koch Bro) money to keep that happening.
And what about that new abortion law?…The one that basically made the last of the clinics throw in the towel.
And what about our fine new “voting rights” law that basically just makes it harder to vote?
So….maybe there is a demographic shift in progress….but it is far from clear to me that Texas is going to go blue anytime soon
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LostNOregon
LostNOregon
5 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
Gerrymandering.
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Eddie_T
Eddie_T
5 years ago
Reply to  LostNOregon
That’s certainly a big part of it. But not the only part.
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Jackula
Jackula
5 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
This kinda stuff motivates the resistance.
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Eddie_T
Eddie_T
5 years ago
Reply to  Jackula
So far I don’t see much of that.
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RonJ
RonJ
5 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
“And what about our fine new “voting rights” law that basically just makes it harder to vote?”
Voting integrity law. Without voter integrity, the right to vote is canceled out by those controlling the outcome through election fraud.
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Eddie_T
Eddie_T
5 years ago
Reply to  RonJ
I’m not against laws designed to keep voting completely on the up and up. For instance, I have no problem with requiring an ID. I have no problem with a database that could be created to weed out prior felons, illegal aliens, and others who might cast a vote they aren’t entitled to make.
The new law here is different. It allows partisan poll watchers to wander around inside the polling places like party apparatchiks, potentially interfering with the right to cast an anonymous vote. 
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Karlmarx
Karlmarx
5 years ago
All millennials don’t live in Williamsburg and San Francisco.  People in Wyoming dont think like those in Vermont and never will.  Just like boomers, millennials are not all clones stamped out of a single mold.
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Six000mileyear
Six000mileyear
5 years ago
As people age, they become more conservative. They become more responsible individuals. M and Z may not be having as many kids as the boomer had, or desiring home ownership; but at some point they WILL have to take their career seriously to survive.
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Esclaro
Esclaro
5 years ago
Reply to  Six000mileyear
Dream on. I have gotten steadily more liberal as I have aged. So has my wife and my ex wife. In fact all 22 members of my extended family vote straight Democratic. All of them are well educated, well paid and loathe Republicans and everything they stand for. 
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Business Man
Business Man
5 years ago
Reply to  Esclaro
You sound like you’re a lot of fun at dinner parties.
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Carl_R
Carl_R
5 years ago
Reply to  Six000mileyear
You are correct. That is historically what happens, but it is not guaranteed. That’s why I have said that the fact that probably 6-800,000 more Republicans will die of Covid than Democrats, it may not change the outcome of elections because of other shifts.
The traditional reason for the conservative shift is that kids come out of school with a utopian vision, and then are confronted with the realities of paying taxes, raising families, and owning homes. Yet, these younger generations seem to be doing less family formation, and home purchasing, so, will they become more conservative? I tend to think not. Rather, I think they will become more extreme in their liberalism, blaming capitalism and politicians for not providing the socialist utopia they dream of, and for leaving them behind. As a result, I think they will prefer that the Republic be replaced by a new form of government, one they decide they want.
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Eddie_T
Eddie_T
5 years ago
Reply to  Carl_R
I think you’re probably right.
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Doug78
Doug78
5 years ago
Reply to  Carl_R
I have been hearing all my life that since the younger generations are more to the left than the older ones that inevitably voting patterns will shift to the left as the older generations die off. Apparantly some of those, the more intelligent, who had been on the left before shift to the right as they age.
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