This is an extended version of a speech given to Eagle Forum’s national conference last week.
Are millennials and Gen Z better off than their parents?
In their childbearing and prime income years, boomers were born into a more unified culture, with much less competition from foreign markets and migrants, far more plentiful family-wage-earning jobs that didn’t require college degrees, far cheaper college for the minority suited for it, far lower inflation for core survival costs, stronger families with less divorce and working mothers, less crime, higher church attendance, higher rates of volunteering for everything from PTA to Little League, fewer cross-country moves from family to obtain a job, more cultural cohesion, and less-woke public schools where students spoke English.
Boomers did not deserve any of those things because of merit; these are a gifted civilizational inheritance that helped them succeed. Yet, as a generation, boomers have passed down none of this to their children and grandchildren.
The boomers grew up in a completely different world than their children and grandchildren live in today. They need to know that and respond. It is an abdication of duty to spend 20, 30 retirement years consuming pleasures rather than leaving an eternal legacy for the people God placed you near.
Boomers are the richest generation in world history, but their children are the most bankrupt, both financially and culturally. The shocking financial realities we’ll look at in a moment are a symbol of the last century’s private equity-style, vulture-capitalism treatment of Americans’ priceless civic inheritance.
The Legacy Window Is Closing
My most recent book, False Flag, argues that family disintegration is a root cause of America’s political and cultural disintegration. Family disintegration is also the root cause of the wealth gap between young and old Americans that is setting us up for crazier politics. You think the Trump era has been crazy? Buckle your seatbelts.
Part of that craziness will come from the steadiness and civic trust we will lose when boomers head — hopefully — to heaven. While millennials and zoomers might rudely trash boomers in public, their deaths will be a huge loss for our country. Boomers are generous with their time and money, patriotic, and better educated than their kids. They have priceless practical knowledge about how to keep engines running, farms producing, and factories operating.
But their window to shape their legacy is closing. Before they go, we younger folks need our grandparents to build and fill supply lines to sustain the ways of life necessary to win a long march of reconquest back through America’s institutions. We need the richest generation in world history to offset the malevolent influences of billionaires like George Soros. And we don’t just need boomers’ money; we need them to teach us by example that some things matter far more than money.
The Economic Despair Spiral
Napoleon Bonaparte famously said that an army marches on its stomach. People worried about affording the medical bills if their kid breaks an arm aren’t persuaded by slogans about the evils of socialism. The right needs to make people’s everyday lives better. The investor Peter Thiel notes, “If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.” Shortly you’ll see why I don’t think we have a capitalist system, but his point remains: People are not likely to support a society in which their futures look worse than their parents’.
You see, the Cold War didn’t fully end. It was imported into American schools, workforces, and media. So, paradoxically, the young have been taught to blame capitalism for the consequences of socialism. The distress young Americans feel, combined with their public school-induced ignorance about Christianity, history, and economics, opens their souls to communism.
A poll out this month found 59 percent of Democrat Party voters support the Democrat Socialists of America, which is just a communist front group, with more than 25 percent of all voters supporting the group.
Communists and socialists agree socialism is merely the preface to communism. The world’s leading Communist country, China, blends communist, socialist, and fascist methods — it widely deploys covert party organizations barely disguised as independent entities. So I divide the world into collectivism and ordered liberty. The United States is now a mix of these, and our bureaucracy has been on a merger path with Communist China, as writer N.S. Lyons argues.
Russ Greene points out that Communist China redistributes less wealth than the United States does. The United States also spends more on redistribution than Canada, and about as much as France, Sweden, and Germany. So if Germany and France are socialist welfare states, what is the United States?
Government debt and deficits from old-age entitlements that the elderly did not earn are causing structural inflation that keeps the young from forming families. Further, the young have not been trained in the virtues necessary to deal with even small hardships. This creates a situation ripe for revolutionary politics and leftist extremism.
While luxuries and tech have gotten cheaper since boomers were young, the price of a middle-class life has skyrocketed: mortgages, rent, college, health insurance, food, and energy. Even things that have gotten cheaper, like new cars and clothing, have cratered in quality. Consumer goods, for example, wear faster and look cheaper, are harder to fix yourself, and can rarely be passed down.
Moreover, cheap screens are creating the dumbest generation in recorded modern history.
Working So Other People Can Relax
These next graphs show that all the core living expenses, in inflation-adjusted dollars, have increased by huge amounts, taking people’s previous budget margins and keeping more Americans out of the middle-class status that promotes social stability.
Here’s a personal example. In our 17 years of marriage, my family’s medical expenses have always been below our deductible (except for the year a kid broke his arm jumping off a playhouse roof). The cost of employer-provided insurance minus those expenses works out to paying $375,000 entirely for other people’s health care, while also paying for nearly all of our own medical expenses. Thanks, Obamacare!
Imagine if we’d been able to invest that money in a house, or retirement or college fund — we’d have about $1.4 million, enough to retire right now! Instead, our government steals our work for other people through hidden taxes like coverage mandates. This is indentured servitude, and it depresses work ethic. So you can see why the gap between the young and old has grown so much — the young pay for far more expenses we can’t get out of than our parents did at our ages.
Most of what today’s young people pay for, both directly and indirectly, are subsidies to the richest generation through Social Security and Medicare. And it’s still not enough. Young people are paying twice as much in taxes to fund Social Security and Medicare as their parents did, and still all those only fund half the costs of Medicare, the most broke of the two entitlements destroying our economy.
These programs now cost so much they are three-quarters of federal spending, more than a quarter of which is now funded by debt (and set to explode further soon).
These two are 95 percent of our nation’s unfunded obligations — the difference between the workers we have to tax and the people expecting to get those workers’ money.
Entitlements Cause Unavoidable Inflation
The truth is, Social Security recipients are getting much more than they paid in. Despite what some may say to make themselves feel better, these programs are straight-up welfare. There’s no way around that fact.
Even if President Trump somehow guts all the fraud in these programs, these realities would remain. In fact, if American retirees only got out of Social Security what they paid in, it would become solvent. Other less painful ways to address this situation would be 1) capping the health expenses people can charge to taxpayers, just like insurance does, and 2) only giving Social Security to those who need it, not those with sufficient retirement wealth.
Do you think boomers would vote for these? They should. The alternative is state-sponsored euthanasia that kills even people who don’t want a lethal injection, which is growing everywhere leftists control healthcare. My point is truly not to bash boomers here, but to open their ears to the young’s complaints.
Now, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has explained, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” This means inflation happens when governments spend more than they tax. Their only honest options for fixing this are raising taxes or cutting spending. The third, dishonest, option is printing money. That is already happening, and the size of this debt bomb is why it’s going to continue.
In fact, we’re facing a spiral in which entitlement-caused inflation pushes interest rates higher, which makes entitlement-fueled debt more expensive, and repeat. If interest rates stay where they are right now, within a decade interest on the federal debt will cost more than Medicare and Social Security.
The only good thing about this situation is that young people mostly don’t know how it works. They just see that boomers eat out often while they can’t afford to anymore, get free health care while we have to have a second income just to pay premiums, and own large homes in safe neighborhoods that we can’t afford. On top of all that, in many states boomers are now insisting they be exempt from property taxes while still expecting an ambulance to come when they call.
The Loss of Cultural Capital Is Even Steeper
Now, let’s be clear: Like every generation in history, boomers also had struggles. Some bought homes in the 1970s while interest rates were 17 percent. I know about boomers’ famous work ethic because my father’s put me through college. Those who retire on their own money are often business owners who for decades risked everything while working overnight, nights, and weekends. I don’t begrudge success to anyone who worked hard and risked much. That’s the American Dream — you are free to rise as high as your efforts take you.
Yet young people feel we aren’t getting the same deal the boomers did. Even if that’s a historically ignorant view, as I’ve shown with these slides, a fair bit of it is true. And it is even more true culturally than economically. Unfortunately, the young are envious of material wealth and don’t prioritize what matters far more, which is rich relationships with family and Jesus Christ.
Here again, boomers received a great political, cultural, and spiritual inheritance that they have passed on to their children in shambles. Boomers grew up in married homes at far higher rates than younger generations. The broken home is an incalculable and typically unnecessary trauma, and it contributes to children’s loss of faith.
Boomers also enjoyed far higher rates of nonworking mothers. It is an incalculable wealth for a child to have his mother available to him from the moment he is conceived. It is also a wealth to a community to have more eyes on the streets, healthier but time-consuming home-cooked food, someone available to tend the sick, lonely, needy, and dying, and someone who makes life worth living with birthday parties, anniversaries, game nights, watching friends’ children for free, and all manner of opportunities to feed social capital and human happiness.
Women who have to work mostly to pay for other people’s health expenses to get effectively catastrophic insurance for their own families have very little time left over to do this kind of natural social beautification. The GDP might go up when a mother works, but it goes up at the expense of all the things she might provide that make her family and friends’ lives worth living.
Boomers grew up in an era of frenetic pairing that sounds like a fairy tale today. One of my beloved church ladies told me that in the 1960s she turned down her husband’s marriage proposal three times before she finally accepted, and she got two more offers in the meantime. This is a common story from the era. Nowadays the young can hardly get a second date, let alone a proposal, let alone five!
Feminism and social media-driven false expectations have destroyed social scripts and clear sex roles that help the young fruitfully interact with each other. This plus no-fault divorce and the feminist sexual free-for-all is destroying marriage. And the erasure of marriage is the leading cause of the childlessness fueling our national bankruptcy.
A Normal Life Is Now a Luxury
Other public goods that subsidize personal happiness have also been destroyed. Now just about every public place — such as parks, schools, and libraries — is colonized by scary people such as vagrants, foreigners who don’t assimilate, woke bureaucrats, and unparented kids with threatening appearances.
This forces families to try to recreate privately what boomers received as a cultural inheritance. That requires extra expense to live at the same level boomers lived at cheaper. The most expensive of these is education. Getting a decent one now requires paying an exorbitant suburban mortgage and property taxes, a mother devoting her full time to homeschooling, or private tuition. Wealth adviser Johann Kurtz calls this the “collapsed commons.”
The most important thing boomers have failed to pass on to their children is Christianity. This is far more important than money, because faith is where humans get meaning, direction, purpose, and true fulfillment.
Losing Christianity means losing America itself. All of our founders, even the deists, believed American self-government was impossible without a Christian people. This is because Christianity teaches people to control themselves, so they do not need a government to do so. This is why, by the way, we should not import people of other faiths — not just because they are less predisposed to self-government but also because peers are extremely important influences on our kids, as Judith Rich explains in The Nurture Assumption.
A 2020 meta-analysis by researcher Lyman Stone finds that “expansions in government service provision and especially increasingly secularized government control of education significantly drive secularization and can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world” (italics original). This means sending kids to godless schools is a top cause of America’s decline.
Research also shows that fathers and mothers parenting their children less — a problem exacerbated when mothers work outside the home and hand kids screens — results in children losing their faith. So all of these economic and cultural factors together push family separation, which in turn pushes secularization, as Mary Eberstadt explains in her book, Primal Screams. Erasing Christianity erases America itself.
Greed and Envy Come From Lost Christianity
I believe this is the core reason Westerners are no longer marrying and having children. It’s not solely about money, because our ancestors had far more children with far fewer comforts. They brought six, seven, a dozen children into the world with no health insurance and often not even a doctor. The pioneers didn’t refuse to buy a house because it was too small or in a not-very-nice neighborhood; they built far smaller houses than the poorest American today lives in, with no indoor plumbing or heating and in wooded expanses teeming with Indian tribes that tortured their enemies to death.
What kept people like that not just alive, but growing and thriving, in far worse circumstances than any of us have ever faced? Christianity. What keeps people going in the hard times that every person and generation experiences are the classic virtues, the chief of which is faith. The despair Americans feel is yet another top indicator of our loss of faith. It is what must change for all the rest to change.
So, what can we all do today to help reverse these conditions of decline?
Well, if you want America to even faintly resemble itself for another 250 years, you have to care about the obstacles to forming Christian families. Without them, we will continue descending slowly into tyranny by generating people only fit for the big-government slave-state we know under the terms socialism, fascism, and communism. Family health is a five-alarm fire for republican self-government.
Also, Americans of every age need to stop whining and take responsibility for our lives. Yes, I’ve discussed many huge headwinds, but every generation faces doom. Praise God half of our children don’t die between birth and age 18. Praise God we don’t have to grow all our own food, because my family would be dead within months with my gardening skills. Praise God the murder rates among today’s invaders are far lower than during yesteryear’s Apache and Comanche raids.
Playing the victim and making excuses are for weaklings and cowards. People of faith don’t gripe about our problems, because we know God is larger than all of them. And that’s why I have hope — it’s not because I think Congress is going to fix this, because it won’t. But God is in control of our destiny. He does “govern in the affairs of men,” as Benjamin Franklin affirmed. And that’s why we first must do what Franklin commended in that same speech — pray for our nation.
Pray for your kids. Pray for our country. Pray for me! We are in a spiritual battle, and prayer is warfare. There is no way we’re getting out of this situation without a spiritual revival, and that revival needs to happen first in our own hearts.
Work Smarter and Harder and Stop Whining
We need to both pray and work. As a working mom, I’ve always had in my mind the image of the Nehemiah of the Bible — a man who oversaw a people resettling their own land who had to build with one hand and fight with the other. I see my professional life as fighting and my home as the thing I’m building. This is the time we have been born to. It’s time to stop whining about it and take action.
In your conference handouts I put some ideas about what work to do. I’m not going to read them to you, but I will give some context to shape that reading.
Boomers, if you’re alive today, God hasn’t signed your retirement slip yet. While I absolutely believe in fierce civic advocacy, our government is deeply broken and we need to solve our own problems without it. As the great Alexis de Tocqueville recognized, America is where people solve our problems privately, and we need to revive that habit of self-government. Focus, like Tocqueville noted, on the people closest to you first. Don’t fund evangelization in Africa until all the children in your church are evangelized through receiving a thoroughly Christian education.
God put you in a certain family, in a certain town, in a certain country. Those closest to you are your first responsibility, given by God. The church has always taught this. Thanks to a new federal tax credit Republicans passed, it will cost you nothing but a little paperwork to send thousands every year to a Christian school starting in January. Do it!
Another magnificent example is the philanthropists funding the Trump accounts for kids, a clever beginning at a response to the entitlements crisis. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation is giving $6 billion to put $250 in those accounts for 25 million kids in low-income ZIP codes. In Indiana, the hedge fund manager Brad Gerstner is donating $100 million to give every Hoosier aged 5 and under another $250 in the account.
You may or may not have $100 million, but you also can fund these accounts. Max out the contribution to your kids and grandkids. Fund every kid at your church. Start an effort to fund every child in your denomination. These funds replace the Social Security these kids won’t get, and the college funds their parents don’t have.
Don’t Wait for Congress. Do It Yourself
Think in similar lines about solving, at whatever level you can, the problems you see for the young people you know. Pay off college debt. Build pipelines to work that don’t involve college, such as a business that invests in training its workers. Help your grandkids with homework, read books to them, and pass your life experiences on. Show up to our lives — we need you.
Read Kurtz’s book, Leaving a Legacy, for some big ideas about how to use wealth wisely, but here I want to address one common mistake. People on the right need to understand what the left does, which is that people are infrastructure. It’s called human capital. If you help pay a salary, or for a good education, or for a line item in a family budget, you are not just giving an income. You are building a legacy that outlasts you in institutional knowledge, leadership, and skills.
This is why lefties steal your tax dollars to fund fake nonprofits: It funds their political army. Do that, but without the fraud. Never fund a non-Christian or non-conservative organization. Build and fund institutions that employ people and take actions aligned with historic American values.
The only way to ensure the money you must leave doesn’t get siphoned into woke garbage is to train the people you leave it to. You leave a legacy by shaping the human beings who live after you to continue doing the same in perpetuity. The point of the wealth is the people. People are the ultimate wealth.
Always Put People First
People are not robots. We learn through apprenticeship. Learning in real life is fundamentally different from learning abstractly in cyberspace. I’ve learned this from close contact with boomers, because unlike younger generations, they know how to build things, how to keep the lights on, and they learned this from life experience. AI cannot replace the human judgment necessary to not just know facts, but to put them together in new ways and understand the consequences if you change the equation. We need more human capital for the AI age, not less.
This is why the U.S. military invests so much in degrees — because personnel is policy. What’s the point of passing a law saying all kids have to learn American history if all the teachers who teach it are Marxists? What’s the point of winning a presidency without thousands of trained staff the president can deploy to enforce the agenda Americans voted for? Good people don’t materialize overnight. They are grown over decades of investment. Americans have strip-mined our people for decades, and it’s time to reverse that and once again invest in people first.
This also has the effect of getting us close, in person, to learn to love each other again. Generational segregation breeds hatred, resentment, envy, and the creepy, dangerous desire to simply get people’s stuff without regard for who they are or how they got it. We solve it through de-segregating ourselves by age.
Every apprentice needs a master and a patron. And every patron and master needs an apprentice. Entitlements have broken this natural life cycle. The rupture is threatening the extinction of the greatest nation that ever existed. By the grace of God, this country has given us everything we have, and we owe it not just gratitude but repayment. The time is short. Let’s roll.
