Baby boomers Ruined America: Why Blaming Millennials is Misguided — and Annoying

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69. An era of unprecedented prosperity that was fizzling by 1974

If there's a problem with the Boomers, it's misplaced expectations. Our parents raised us with the expectation that things were going to be like the 1950s and 60s forever. That all we had to do was find a steady job, get a career going, and maybe save up a little to invest in the stock market and we'd be able to live comfortably and see our wealth grow and grow so that we could launch our own kids into the world and then enjoy retirement.

That's the way it had been for them -- at least once they'd survived the Depression and World War II -- and they assured us it would be the same for us, only better because we wouldn't have the rough patches at the beginning.

Only it wasn't. Or it was to some extent for the older Boomers -- but by the time those born after 1955 were getting out of college, it was already a lot harder. And things got really tough everywhere under Reagan, when it became necessary to have a two-income family just to do what our parents had done on one, and then when even that wasn't enough to pay off the mortgage and send the kids to college without loans and also plump up the IRA.

My own generation has its flaws -- which I was quite aware of by the time I was in high school. But they're mainly the flaws of having been raised to inherit a world that no longer exists. We didn't create today's world -- we mostly got blindsided by it.