Boomer Bashing Is Stupid | Thursday Special

Boomers ruined housing. Boomers hoarded the wealth. Boomers pulled up the ladder.

At least, that’s the story.

But there’s a problem: the charges contradict each other.

In this Thursday Special, Chad takes on America’s increasingly fashionable Boomer Bashing and asks the question almost nobody seems interested in answering:

What exactly were they supposed to do differently?

Sell the house? They cashed out.

Stay? They’re hoarding.

Leave it to their children? They created generational inequality.

That leads to a new Common Sense tool: The Innocent Move Test—a simple way to distinguish a legitimate accusation from blame looking for a target.

Along the way, Chad digs into housing supply, home appreciation versus actual spendable wealth, inheritance, tax incentives, environmental review, the generational wealth argument, and why older homeowners can be simultaneously wealthy on paper and economically trapped.

But the episode ultimately lands somewhere more personal.

Boomers may have over-corrected—but perhaps their greatest mistake was succeeding too well at something their children rarely noticed: making struggle look like ease.

As Chad puts it:

“The ease was the gift. It was the most expensive thing they ever bought us. And we entered it into evidence against them.” 

The answer to bad policy isn’t generational resentment.

Name the line item. Fix the law.

📱 Questions or arguments? 252-CHAD-LAW

Common Sense with Chad Law
We translate America’s most complicated conversations into common sense.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Boomer Bashing
 01:43 The Generational Divide: Boomers vs. Millennials
 13:07 Economic Realities: Housing and Wealth Disparities
 18:30 The Complexity of Home Ownership and Inheritance
 19:36 The Misinterpretation of Generational Wealth
 22:24 Environmental Legislation and Housing Supply
 25:25 The Innocent Move Test: Understanding Blame
 29:50 The Over-Correction of Boomers
 35:15 The Gift of Ease: A Boomer Legacy
 41:07 The Need for Accountability in Policy Change

#Boomers #BabyBoomers #Millennials #HousingCrisis #GenerationalWealth #HousingMarket #CommonSense #ChadLaw #Politics #Economy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

America, doesn't the boomer bashing feel good? Isn't it great to wake up, pick up your phone, and watch a thirty-five year old man explain that the boomers ruined the country? He's got a coffee, he's got a ring light, and he's sitting in his apartment his mother co-signed for. And he's got a theory. I don't think it feels good. I am so sick of the boomer bashing. Not because I have a problem going after people in public. I don't. I think we should bring back public hanging. I'm all for public blame, public shame. Put a name on it, put it on a screen, let everybody have a look. I'm in. If it's an actual accusation. But pinning your self-anger, your jealousy, and your own lack on a generation is not an accusation. It's just dumb. So let me ask you something, America. This generation of hoarders, market manipulators, selfish takers, the boomers. How is that the same generation that expanded social programs in this country to a level nobody had ever seen, and then never let a single one of them be repealed? Pick one. You do not get both. Either they're the greediest generation in American history, or they're the most generous one. Right now we're saying both in the same week, sometimes in the same article. And nobody blinks. That is not an investigation. That's an itch, and the whole country is standing around scratching it. And tonight I'm going to hand you one question that takes the whole thing apart. Show me the innocent move. Tell me, tell me what these people were supposed to have done differently. Hold on to that. We're going to need it a little later. But real quick, don't forget, if you're tuning in for the first time, I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, and America, this is common sense. If you've got a question, an argument, or think I've got this dead wrong, text 252 Chad Law. I'll answer your texts in the after hours. For now, let's take this thing apart. I'm going to tell you how I got here because I didn't go looking for this. I saw it online first, like everyone does, and I did what you do. I filed it under lunatics. This boomer bashing. The internet has a lunatic quota and mine fills before breakfast. I figured boomer bashing isn't a real thing, it's fringe. Then I'm talking to my best friend, married to a man quite a bit older than her, and she started complaining to me about his boomer clutter. Not an anonymous account, not a stranger with a cartoon avatar, a friend, about her husband in her own house. That's when I stopped filing it under lunatics. So I did the thing I'd recommend to anyone about anything. I asked, picked up the phone, called my parents, and asked them flat out whether boomer bashing happens to them. Apparently it does, it happens to them. My mom happens to look a lot younger than she is. That matters. It's not just a brag, so stay with me. She's at the salon getting her hair washed. The young woman at the sink in her twenties has no idea who she's talking to. And she goes off on a full diatribe. People over sixty or this, people over sixty or that. They got theirs and they're they wrecked it for the rest of us. My mom let her finish. My mom's very polite person, unlike me. But she said very politely, hey, just FYI, you're talking to one of those people. And here's the part that got me. My mom wasn't offended, not even a little. She was more so shocked, and not at the rudeness, just at the scope. Because look at what that girl actually charged her with. One age group is responsible for the economy, for the housing market, for social programs, for international relations? I mean, international relations. My mother was a public school teacher. And that young woman is not the villain of the story, don't get me wrong. She didn't invent any of it. Somebody handed it to her, fully assembled, and she was just repeating it the way you repeat anything everyone around you already believes. She wasn't being cruel. She thought she was making conversation. That was her job. So don't blame her either. I think that's actually worse. Because at least cruelty you can argue with. That was just the water, I guess, just a fact. Then there's my dad. My father's one of those guys who reads the political sites and gets into the message boards, Breitbart, and places like that. Conservative sites, his people. You know what they hit him with when they don't feel like answering him? I just learned this. They say, okay, boomer, in the comments. On a conservative message board from his own side, he makes an argument, and instead of an answer, he gets a birth year handed back to him like it's some kind of receipt. So nobody can tell me this is a left-wing thing. My mother got it from a stranger at a sink, and my father gets it from the guys he already agrees with. Oh, and while they're at it, those same message boards call my dad homophobe regularly. His son is the last gay conservative. I say the word in every first sentence of every episode I have ever made, but sure, homophobe. Somebody typed it, so it must have been checked, right? And I know what you're thinking, because I thought at first. Who cares what a comment section says, Chad? And I agree. That's the point. One comment is noise. The same comment from strangers on the left and the right arriving in place of an answer every single time is not noise. That's a pattern. And what's the name of the game on this show is finding patterns. And notice something about that clutter line because it's the whole show in one word. My parents don't have any stuff. There is no bloom or clutter. They're like me. We throw everything out. There is no garage full of coffee cans. There is no bloom or clutter because there is no clutter. The word doesn't describe them, it was never trying to. That's what a birth year does, though. See, it arrives already knowing what you are and it doesn't check. Let me tell you how I know, since we're being honest. I don't sit down looking for both sides. I never have. I sit down looking for the pattern. Sometimes the pattern lands on the left, sometimes it lands on the right, sometimes it runs straight through both of them, and nobody claps at all. This one runs through both, and I'm going to show you how. I brought receipts, which I always do, and it's more than the other side has managed in about five years of doing this. And before anyone accuses me of being precious about it, complaining about another generation is not new. It's the oldest hobby people have. Aristophanes wrote a whole comedy about it in Athens 2,400 years ago. The plot: a young man goes off, learns the fashionable new way of arguing, comes home, beats up his own father, and then explains to him why it was justified. 2,400 years, same show, just worth light, worse lighting. Your grandmother complained about your mother's skirt. Somebody in 1956 was certain Elvis was the end of the Republic, and he wrote it down, and people clipped it out and agreed with him. That's normal. That's people. This? The boomer bashing? Not that. And here's how I know, here's the thing that actually got you this episode. Two days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece called Aging Californians Aren't Moving Out of Their Homes, written by a Grace Tahoe, not a comment section, not a kid with a ring light and a theory. The Los Angeles Times, which has editors and a masthead and a byline and an actual person who put her name on it, embarrassingly enough. And they found the culprit. Old people, boomers. The framing, and I'm not exaggerating it, as Californians age, many are choosing to stay put. So even as houses add up, nothing loosens up. Choosing. That's the word. That's the word that had me pacing around my kitchen all night because look at what it's doing. Choosing means it's a decision, a preference, a small, comfortable act of selfishness, dressed up for print, run past an editor, and published as the explanation. Grace, if you're watching, and somebody will send this to you, I don't think you're a villain. I think you wrote the story the way everybody writes this story now. That's the problem. This has become the house style. And here's the tell in the house style. Nobody who has ever sat at a kitchen table and run these numbers writes the sentence choosing to stay put. You only write that sentence if you've never had to do the math. So here's the whole ladder. It starts as a joke on the internet, then it's your friend about her own husband in her kitchen, then it's my mom at a sink from a stranger, then it's my dad from his own side, and now it's the LA Times. So that's why we're doing this tonight. Because I am fed up. But let's do what I always do. Let's take the LA Times at its word and go look. There's a companion version of that story running over at LA Ist, and they put the question to Dole Myers, a demographer at USC who studies this for a living. Why don't older Californians move? He came back and said the number one reason why people don't move is just inertia. Inertia. That's the finding. A major American newspaper and a university demographer, and the answer is that an entire generation is just sitting there, objects at rest. Newton's first law applied to your mother and grandmother. It isn't inertia, ladies and gentlemen. It's arithmetic. Cold, specific federal arithmetic, and once you see it, you will not be able to unsee it. Let me tell you about my house. I grew up in the mid-90s. My parents bought it for a couple hundred grand in Southern California. And before anybody's eyes light up, this was not a nice house. I need you to understand how not nice this house was, because this is the part that gets sanded off every time someone tells this story. The walls were pink, not blush, not rose, pepto pink. The carpet was royal blue, high pile with wave designs in it, wall to wall, including, and sit with this one, the kitchen. There was carpet in the kitchen where the food is. And the yard was rock gardens. Not a rock garden with plants in it, just rocks. There was not one living thing in that yard, which means nothing could die. So you could call that a strategy, I guess. That's what doing everything right bought two people in the middle of their lives. Here's what everybody gets wrong about their parents' first house, and I said it in the housing episode, and I'll say it louder now. Nobody's parents started with taste. They didn't start with a wine fridge. They didn't start with a mud room. There was a room where the mud went. It was called the entire house. Now the instructions. My parents gave me and my sister and brothers the exact same advice they got word for word, because that's what you did. Four lines. The whole American middle class catechism recited to that generation by their parents, their church, their bank, and every commercial that ran between the innings. Save 10%, put it down on a house, buy as soon as you possibly can, get a secure job, get the four-year degree. That was the deal. My parents went six for six. They didn't deviate, they didn't get cute, they didn't day trade anything. They bought a house with pink walls, a carpeted kitchen, and they fixed one thing at a time for 20 years as the money showed up. A water heater one year, a bathroom the next, a kitchen once badly, in a color I'm told was popular. And that house, like every other house on that street, like most of coastal California, is worth seven figures today. They didn't do that. Let me be clear about who did, because this is where the whole indictment falls apart. My dad could not have manipulated a housing market if you handed him the market in a diagram. Houses in that part of the country outran inflation by something like three to one. Their wages didn't do that, their savings didn't do that, nothing they earned did that. Forty years of policy did that, and my parents happened to be standing in the room when it happened. Some of you just did the math and decided I have rich parents. They're not. They're upper middle class people who worked a system that was handed to them exactly the way they were told to. And that seven-figure number does not mean what you think, because this is the load-bearing lie in this entire argument. Folks, you do not live large on home appreciation. An expensive house does not mean there is money. Two completely different facts, and this country has welded them into one accusation. Folks, appreciation is not income. It's a number on a screen. You can't eat it, you can't spend it, you can't send it to a university. There are two ways to touch it, and one of them is dying. The other one is borrowing against it. That's what my mom did twice. My mom mortgaged that house, the one with the pink walls, twice to pay for college tuition for her kids. So when somebody gets online and starts yelling about all that boomer equity, all that wealth just sitting there, a lot of it isn't sitting anywhere. It already left. It went into the tuition of the generation doing the yelling. It's not in the house. It's in a diploma somebody's using to type with. And my mother, for a long stretch of it, was a single mom and a public school teacher. Hold on to that. We're coming back to it. And when we do, it's going to change how this whole thing sounds. Now, the part nobody outside California understands, and it's the most important fact in this argument. That house being worth seven figures does not make you rich. It actually makes you stuck. Ask the obvious question. What are they supposed to downsize to? Downsize to what? In that county, the starter home, the entry level, first rung, nothing special. This is where you begin house runs well north of a million dollars. So you sell your seven-figure house and you can't afford the cheap house down the street. The floor is above your head. There is no rung below you to downsize to. You know what the actual next step down in coastal California would be for my parents? A mobile home. That's the real answer. That's the next thing that exists. And there are fewer of those parks every year because they keep getting closed and redeveloped out from under people living in them. So that's the menu. Stay in the house you can't maintain or move into a park that's being sold to a developer. So when the LA Times tells me people are choosing to stay put, I want somebody at that paper to answer one question. Move where? Where are they supposed to go? And this isn't a fringe position. Housing Wire ran a piece in June about older Americans stuck in homes that no longer fit them, quoting a Northern California agent named Wendy Newman who does this for a living. Her verdict on the aging in place? They're trapped there economically. That was her quote. Trapped from a realtor, not an advocate, somebody who sits at a kitchen table and runs numbers for a living. So the industry knows it just doesn't make the headline because trapped doesn't get clicked and hoarding does. But I'm not doing a housing episode tonight. I did that one. Tonight housing is just where you can watch this boomer bashing machine work. But let's read the actual law. When you sell your house, the federal government lets you keep some of the gain tax free. Single, $250,000 and $500,000 if you're married. Those numbers were set in 1997. 1997, never adjusted, not once. Not for inflation, not for the housing market, not for anything. That number is old enough to rent a car. Congress has looked at it for 30 years and decided it's fine. Houses, on the other hand, have tripled and quadrupled, and the shield the government gave you has not moved one dollar since the year Titanic came out. Everything past that line gets taxed. And in California, the state doesn't even give it the courtesy of a capital gains rate. California taxes it like a paycheck. Like you went to work and earned it. And here's the one that made me put the pen down. If your husband dies, you keep the $500,000 for two years. Two years from the date of death. Sell in month $23, you keep $500,000. Sell in month $55, you keep $250,000 and you're taxed on the difference. So let me say that as plainly as I know how. The United States Tax Code has an official position on how fast a widow should get over her husband. And the position is two years. Miss it because you were 74 and grieving and not in a hurry to make a real estate decision, and we bill you. Congratulations. But now finish the audit. Suppose she doesn't sell. Suppose she stays in that house until the end. Her kids inherit it. And because of a rule that basically pretends the house was bought on the day she died, they can sell it for the full value and owe close to nothing. So do you understand what we built? Honestly, under the law we have right now, the cheapest legal way for your mother to give you that house is to die in it. Somebody wrote that in a building with a flag on it. Other people voted for it. It's been sitting there for 30 years. And then we get online and call that same mother a hoarder for reading it correctly. My parents did move just this last year for one reason. My sister has kids, and my mother wanted to be near her grandchildren. That's it. That's the whole motive. There's no clever financial story in it. And if you want to know how that was even possible, because in 2021, California finally let someone over 55 carry their property tax assessment with them when they move. Proposition 19. It passed with 51% of the vote. 51. So let's be honest about what happened in my family. My parents didn't move because they're better people than the ones who stayed. No. They moved because a ballot measure squeaked through by one point and handed them a door. Take that one measure away and they're still in that same house we bought with the pink walls. And some kid with a ring light is calling them hoarders because they won't move. That's the line item. That's the whole finding. They're not hoarding. They're complying. And the ones who can't move aren't choosing anything. They're stuck. They just don't have a door. The cost is too high, and there's nowhere to go. So let me give the boomer bashing side its best number, their strongest one. I'll make the case for them right now. It comes from Redfin, and you've seen it, whether you know it or not, because it gets recycled into a headline about every six weeks. Empty nest baby boomers own 28% of American homes with three or more bedrooms. Millennials with kids, about half of that. That's a real number, real analysis. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Here's what it does not tell you. It counts bedrooms. It does not count people. It does not count money. And it does not know the difference between a family compound and a paid-off ranch house with a leaking roof and one person in it. It's a measure of square footage sorted by birth year, and we've been reading it as a measure of greed sorted by character. Watch for that move tonight. A number about assets gets reported as a story about a generation. Every freaking time. I'm tired of it. So let's check the charges. Let's do the thing nobody does. Charge one, they wrecked the planet. Hmm. That generation built the environmental movement. EPA, Clean Air Act, the first Earth Day, 20 million people in the street, most of them under 30. Charge two. They only care about themselves. Um, no, they created special education, disability access, children's health coverage, money voted for people who could never pay it back and never do a thing for them. They hoarded everything. They passed a prescription drug benefit and didn't pay for it. That's a man picking up the check for a table of 40 without looking at his own balance. And I want to be careful here because I'm not standing up here telling you the boomers were wonderful. They don't have to be good for my argument to work. No one does. It's not about good or bad. That's the whole point. I don't need anyone innocent. I just need charges to make sense. So ask it again, and this time how stupid the answer has to be. How is the greediest generation in American history also the one that voted the biggest expansion for help for strangers in American history? It isn't. It can't be. One of those is a lie. And there's only one explanation that survives, and it should make everyone uncomfortable, including my side. A hell of a lot of boomer resentment isn't generational at all when you peel it back. It's a class argument wearing a birth year, thanks to this socialist uprising we see in the country. Because when you say the rich out loud in America, half the room flinches because half that room still plans on being rich. That's the one attack you're not allowed to run here because that's the main goal. So we found a word that means the same thing and doesn't sound like it. Say boomer. And everyone knows exactly who's meant. Somebody with a house, somebody with equity, somebody comfortable. Comfortable, God forbid. And nobody feels personally indicted, and it doesn't sound like a political theory. It's great. Sounds like a joke about your mom jeans or your dad on Facebook. That's how this survives contact with the record. A lot of the time it was never describing a generation at all. It was describing an asset and pointing at whoever's holding it. You can prove that in four seconds. Go look at what that generation actually has. An enormous share of them have almost nothing. No pension, next to no retirement savings, living on Social Security and whatever's left. They're not in the joke. Nobody makes a boomer joke about a 74-year-old renting an apartment in Bakersfield because he doesn't fit. He might be the same age, same politics, same taste in music, but he doesn't have an asset. There's your tell. The word isn't tracking a birth year, it's tracking a balance sheet and using the birth year as cover. Because in this country, you're allowed to hate a decade. You're not allowed to hate a class, even though they do, so they hide it. And one more, because it's the funniest one and almost nobody knows it. The most effective weapon against building housing in America is environmental review. NEPA and SECA, CEQA, both 1970. SECA was signed by Ronald Reagan, which I enjoy for reasons I don't need to explain to anyone. Those were that generation's proudest victories, written to stop a freeway from being bulldozed through a neighborhood and a refinery from being dropped next to an elementary school. Good laws, noble as hell. Fifty-six years later, the Clean Air Act's main job is stopping duplexes. So when someone tells you the boomers broke housing, they're half right, but they're pointed at the wrong half. The law strangling supply is a progressive trophy, passed by the generation progressives now blame, doing exactly what it was designed to do to a target nobody saw coming. That's not a moral failing, that's a good law that aged badly. Happens to good laws every day. It's why we have the repeal function. And it's the entire reason it matters whether you're mad at a statute or mad at a birth year. Because one of those you can fix, the other is a pipe dream. Now, I want to read you a headline because it's a perfect specimen, and I mean that with some affection. Business insider, Philippe de Mott, the housing shortage is getting no help from aging boomers. Getting no help. Like they're standing on the sidelines of a house fire with their arms folded. But go into that piece, which I know is a novel idea these days, but if you go into that piece, Redfin's own chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, is quoted saying something completely different from that headline. Her point is that we are not building housing that suits older Americans, and that politicians ought to fix that, which would help everyone at every age. She's right. I agree with her fully. No notes. See, that is an accusation with a remedy attached, and I'd sign it. Now, look at what happened between her quote and the headline. She named a missing product. The headline named a defendant, a villain. That's the whole disease on one page. So we're done talking about boomers. Now we're talking about how blame works. And I'm gonna give you the thing I promised you at the top. It's got a name in two parts, and you can use it on anyone, on any subject starting tonight. We'll call it the innocent move test. But first, why any of this is happening, and it's barely even about boomers. It's free. That's really why. That's the mechanism. It costs nobody anything to blame boomers. See, every other group in this country has somebody who shows up. Somebody makes a call, somebody writes a letter, there's an organization, there's a hashtag, there's legal exposure, there's a guy from HR. There is no anti-defamation league for a birth year. They're large, they're identifiable, they have no advocacy apparatus, no protected class exposure, and most of them aren't on the platform where it's happening in any form that lets them fight back in the same register. You can say anything about them in public under your own name, and nothing happens to you. You see, blame is fluid. It runs downhill, and downhill means whoever can't sue you. And once you understand it's free, both halves of the test start to make sense. Part one. Do the accusations contradict each other? See, a real accusation is damaged by contradiction. Point out the inconsistency, and it has to answer or back up. Blame, on the other hand, doesn't care. You can set they hoarded everything and they gave everything away side by side, and nobody blinks because the contradiction was never load-bearing in the first place. Here's the order of operations. This is how you catch it every time. Evidence, then verdict. That's an accusation. Defendant, then evidence, that's blame. The second one gets collected afterward by different people who already knew who was guilty, which is exactly why the charges don't line up. Nobody ever compared them. Comparing them was never the point. It's just to have the blame game. Because why would you proofread something that costs you nothing to say? Part two. And this one ends arguments. This is my personal favorite. Just ask one follow-up. What should they be doing right now or back then that fixes this? Then watch which direction it goes. You see, a serious accusation gets more specific under a question. It narrows. You get a mechanism or a date, a bill, a number. Blame gets vaguer, it widens, it changes the subject, or it says the original thing again, louder with more feeling. And this test has to be fair, or it's worthless. The bar is not, do you have the solution? Plenty of true accusations come from people who don't have the fix. The bar is, can you describe what a fix would even look like? I don't have the policy, but here's what would count as one. That passes instantly. That's an honest person. But blame can't do that. It can't sketch the shape of a solution even in an outline because there was never a problem being analyzed. There was a feeling being discharged. So run it on my own mom. Sell the house? Guilty. You cashed out at the top and made it worse for everyone. Okay, so she stays in the house. Guilty. You're hoarding. Die and leave it to your kids? Believe it or not, also guilty. That's the greatest wealth transfer, largest inequality event in modern American history. Okay. Show me the innocent move. Show me what they could have done or could be doing right now to make it better. There isn't one. So we know that's not an accusation. That's a target with charges taped to it. So put that question in your pocket and use it on anyone. Use it on me. If there is nothing a person could have done that would have made them innocent, you are not holding an argument. You're holding a mood with a name attached. And now you know why nobody ever finishes that sentence. Everybody thinks it's laziness. It isn't. The silence is doing the work, ladies and gentlemen. And every honest answer either sounds monstrous out loud or it points at a statute. And the second it points at a statute, the fun stops. So you can't sneer at a tax code. It doesn't have a birth year, it doesn't have a Facebook page. It just sits there being fixable, which is the last thing anyone enjoying this wants it to be. Let's run the test on one that passes. Because you know how I feel. A tool that I give you that only convicts the other guy isn't a tool. I did a whole episode saying the government is manufacturing the housing shortage. So what they should they do about it tomorrow morning? Let's see. Legalize the small ugly house. Five words, no flinch, no subject change, no volume. You can disagree with me. You can tell me I'm wrong. You can bring me numbers and receipts. That's what it looks like when somebody actually made a real accusation. And here's mine on my own side because I'm not running this test on people I disagree with and then hiding behind it. We do this with immigrants constantly. They're lazy, they won't work, they're on the dole, and they're taking all the jobs. That's my favorite. Both, same week, same rally, sometimes the same photograph. Nobody on my side blinks either because it's the same machine and it's free. And the people it's aimed at also don't have anyone who shows up like the boomers. Same tell, same disease, just a different target. Blame immigrants, blame boomers. Again, blame feels great, but it helps nothing. So, like I always do, I open the books. Boomers, they followed the instructions. They gave away more than anyone asked them for, and the case against them can't survive a single follow-up question. Everything comes back clean. And an audit where everything comes back clean isn't an audit, it's a press release. So here it is. I found the one thing boomers are actually guilty of us. They didn't teach us to be afraid of money. You see, that generation came from depression parents. People who kept the twist ties, people who washed and reused a piece of aluminum foil until it was the size of a stamp. Scarcity was the water they swam in, and they passed it down hard because to them it was a survival skill. And their kids, my parents, your parents, and I would bet a lot of other parents, looked at that and made a different call. And this is not just my family, somebody counted it. U.S. Bank ran a survey with Morning Consult this summer, and today's parents are the first generation in this country where a majority actually talked to their kids about money. The first ever. That's happening right now this year. See, the silence isn't a boomer invention. They inherited it. What they added was the reason. They gave us the plan, save 10%, put a down payment on the house, get the job, get the degree. They handed us every bit of it. And they withheld the fear on purpose. Because they didn't want their children growing up with a sense of lack like they did. They wanted to provide. That was the point of the pink walls and the blue carpet, two mortgages and the 30 years of making that house a little better every year, so that we would never feel what they felt. You want to know how well it worked? Look at three of us, the kids. I'm the entrepreneur who'll spend his last five pennies chasing something. My little sister, she can stretch a dollar past the limits of physics. And my youngest brother, Taylor, is the hoarder. He won't spend it, he won't stretch it, he just holds on. Same parents, same house, same no instructions, three completely different money brains. Because when nobody hands you a strict rule, you invent one. And what you invent is your temperament with a story attached. So there it is, the whole audit in one finding. The only thing you can really blame boomers for is overcorrecting. That's the charge sheet. That's all of it. They took the one thing that made their own childhoods heavy, and they decided their kids would never have to carry it, and they were so good at it that we grew up with no idea what carrying it even feels like. Overcorrection, not greed, not hoarding, not selfishness. They pushed too hard in one direction and they did it on purpose, and they did it for us. Go ahead and put that on the indictment. I'll sign it personally. Oh, and by the way, that's your boomer clutter. This whole thing started with my friend calling her boomer husband's junk clutter, boomer clutter. Didn't even know that was a thing. The actual hoarder in my family is my youngest brother who hoards cash. But, anyways, now, I told you we'd come back to my mom. I know you guys love my personal family stories. I don't do them very often. But my mom was a single mom. She's a public school teacher. And for years, she had to go to her own father, my grandfather, the man who spent three wars as a navigator in the Air Force, wanted to be a pilot, and instead spent World War II and Korea and Vietnam telling other men where they were and how to get home, and retired at a rank he earned the slow hard way. She had to go to that man and ask for financial help as a single mom. And I want you to guess how many of us kids knew. None. Not one of us. Not until much later when we were adults. She ate it in private on purpose, so her kids would never have to carry an ounce of it. That generation, the boomer generation, performed ease for all of us. They took the fear and the shortfall and the arithmetic at the kitchen table after we'd gone to bed, and they handed us a childhood that looked effortless. And now the belief that it was effortless is the entire case against them? You had it easy. I had it easy. That's the charge. That's the whole charge. The ease was the gift. It was the most expensive thing they ever bought us, and we entered it into evidence against them. And that kid from the top of the show, the one with the ring light and the theory and the co-signed lease, he's gonna be 70 on a platform that never deletes anything, having personally established the precedent that when one generation is holding the assets and the next one can't get them, contempt is the correct response. He's not going after his parents. He's writing the case against himself. So here's what I want from you. One thing. Name the line item. Name it. Not the person, not the birth year, the statute. $250,000 set in 1997, never indexed. Go change it. A two-year grief window in the tax code? A code that makes dying cheaper than moving? Environmental review used to stop a duplex. Nothing legal to build between a two-story house and a mobile home park. Every single thing you're mad about has a name, a number, and a room where somebody voted on it. And I'll tell you why nobody hands you the line item. Because a line item requires work. Showing up, reading something boring, calling someone, losing a few times first. Blaming my parents is free. And boy, it feels good tonight. That's the trade. And look at what the country got for it. Five years of this, tens of millions of posts, a whole vocabulary of boomer bashing. And not one law changed that makes housing or wealth building or saving or investing better for younger generations. It has been done before, though. That's the part that should make you angry. In 1983, Social Security was months from not being able to pay out, and a big piece of that fight got aimed straight at the boomers. They were the wave that was gonna break it. Sound familiar? Then Reagan and Tip O'Neill, who agreed on almost nothing, sat down and fixed it, raised the payroll tax, raised the retirement age slowly, and the people working at the time paid for it, including the ones you'd just spent a year being told were the problem. And here's what Reagan said when he signed it. It assures the elderly that America will always keep the promise made in troubled times a half a century ago. It assures those who are still working that they, too, have a pact with the future. A pact with the future. There was no shortage of generations to blame that year. They didn't reach for one. They found the line item and they changed it. Go figure. What a radical concept. My parents followed every instruction we gave them. They handed forward more than anybody asked. And they hid what it cost them so we'd never have to feel it. They didn't choose any of this. So leave my parents and the boomers out of it. And America, that was common sense on a Thursday special. Stick around for the after hours while I answer all the texts that came in during the live show. All right, we're here. Let's get into these texts. Dana, ending in 8814. She says, Chad, I cannot get past the carpeted kitchen. Was there also carpet in the bathroom? I need to know. Dana, I've thought about that kitchen more this week than in the 20 years I lived there. Uh yes, the bathroom was carpeted. But I can't exactly remember, but I'm pretty sure. I'm gonna say that a house with pink walls and a yard made entirely of rocks was not a house where anyone was drawing hard lines where the carpet stops. And my parents didn't buy that. They bought a location and inherited somebody else's taste. That's what everyone's parents did. Nobody walked in and said, you know what this needs more of? More blue carpet.

unknown 39:18

No.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

Great question. All right, Marcus 3327. Prop 19 is a California thing, Chad. Your whole argument is a California argument. Most of the country doesn't have this. Uh you're half right. And the half you're wrong about is the more interesting half, so let me correct myself in public. Actually, almost every state has a senior property tax relief. There's exemptions, freezes, deferrals, credits. Go look up your own state. You've probably got two or three of them right there. So no, California did not invent being nice to old homeowners. But look at what all that relief actually does. An exemption cuts your bill on the house you're in. A freeze locks your assessment on the house you're in. A deferral postpones the tax on the house you're in. Every single one of them is relief for staying. Prop 19 is different because it's relief for moving. It lets you take the deal with you. And that version is rare. Texas actually did it first. Voters there passed it in 1997, and a senior can carry that school tax freeze to a new house as a percentage. Florida lets you save your save our homes benefit, and in 2020 they voted 74% to give people three years to do it instead of two. Two red states quietly doing the smart thing. After that, the list gets short in a hurry. So thank you, because your correction makes my point worse for the other side, not better. It isn't that America forgot about seniors. America built a nationwide system that pays them to stay exactly where they are, and then hired people to write articles calling it a choice. The federal piece doesn't move either. That exclusion number is the same in Ohio, same in Georgia, same in Montana. The two-year widow, the two-year window after your husband dies is federal. Dying can be cheaper than selling is federal. So everyone's standing at the same wall. California just cut the door in, barely by one point, five years ago. That's it. All right, great question. Renee ending in 5902. Okay, so if not teaching us about money was the mistake, what am I supposed to do with my kids? I don't want them anxious about money. Renee, that's a fair question. And I don't have a clean answer, so I'll try to give you the honest one. I really don't think the mistake was protecting us. I think the mistake was assuming the lesson would show up on its own. My parents didn't hide the fear because they were careless. They hid it because they loved us and they'd watch their own parents transmit it like a disease. That's a defensible decision. It's just that the fear wasn't only fear. Some of it was information. So I wouldn't hand your kids scarcity. Hand them the arithmetic. Let them see the trade-off without carrying the weight of it. Say the number out loud at the kitchen table sometimes. And I'm not a parent, so weigh that accordingly, please. I'm just the guy who spends his last five pennies, who needs a team of people to manage me financially. Let's put it that way. Trevor, ending in four four seven one. Your parents aren't downsizing, they're relocating. Sitting on that much equity is not stuck. Stuck is my rent going up again. Another one of these. Trevor, you're right on the first part, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Moving to be near your grandkids is a relocation. I never send my parents downsized. And your rent going up is a worse problem than anything I described tonight. Here's where you've got it wrong, and it's the piece almost everyone misses, so don't feel bad. Equity is not the constraint. The floor is. If the cheapest house in the county costs more than what you're selling, or right around the same, then having $800,000 in equity and having $200,000 in equity put you in exactly the same spot. The parking lot. There's nowhere to go. Equity doesn't buy you a smaller house when there is no smaller house. It buys you a down payment on a problem that doesn't come in your size. And the reason you can't buy and the reason my mother couldn't downsize are the same reason. There's nothing cheap to buy. Same missing house. You're not on opposite sides of this. You're standing in the same line and somebody talked you into fighting the guy in front of you. Hi, I'm here. Try to nail me next time. All right, Kyle, 2065. Respectfully, you did an hour defending your own parents, so here we go. That's not analysis, that's a son. Of course you landed where you landed. Yeah, nice try, Kyle. Maybe a little fair. Let's do that. You know, I am not a neutral party. I never have been. I told you that in the first two minutes. I didn't bury it in a disclosure at the end. This is not balanced news. I'm not a media guy. I'm a conservative. But run the test on me. Ask me what would change my mind. Easy. Show me the generation acting as a block. Show me a vote where they moved together against everybody else. Show me the thing they hoarded and didn't hand down. Show me what my mother should have done differently, specifically with a date on it. You can't. Nobody has. Five years of boomer bashing and nobody's produced it. Now you go. What would make you wrong? If the answer is nothing, you're not arguing with me, Kyle. You're scratching your anger itch. And if you don't treat that itch, it's going to come back stronger and more radical. Angela, ending in 7719. Serious question. When the boomers are gone, who gets blamed next? Gen X, obviously. And they're going to be thrilled because it'll be the first time anyone's ever noticed them. The target changes and the machine doesn't. That's what tonight was about. Somebody will be holding something somebody else can't get, and there will be a word for those people, and it'll be free to say, and nobody will check it. Just like boomer bashing. The only thing that ever breaks it is one question. What should they be doing or what should they have done right now that will fix your complaint? Ask it out loud this week. Watch what happens in the room. It's a lot of fun. All right, that's it. Go check someone who's over 60 and tell them how wonderful they are. God bless you, President Reagan, and as always, may God save America.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

Smart that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for this. It's wonderful. It's so marvelous. That you should care for me. It's one story as it's glad.