Baby Boomers saved and earned — don’t blame them if you failed 

Batya Ungar-Sargon recently argued in The Hill that Americans born right after World War II — the “Baby Boomers,” as we call them — are helping cause high prices, scarce housing and expensive health care for the young. Boomers, who have spent their lives working and saving, have benefited from rising stock and home values, gaining an economic security from which the young are excluded.

This is a popular theme, and one that is not without a kernel of truth. Boomers do indeed have much to answer for. They allowed our government to go too deeply into debt, they failed to fight for better public education and they endorsed the wrong-headed idea of college for all.

But the fact that the Boomers became wealthy is not one of the things for which they should be blamed. Indeed, their hard work, savings and investments provided the labor and capital that propelled our nation’s economic growth through the turn of the century. Younger Americans should actually be thanking Boomers for their contribution. 

The Millennial generation initially fell behind on reaching key financial goals. This was mainly because many of them came of age during or after the Great Recession. But a St. Louis Federal Reserve study has shown that by early 2024, Millennials and older Gen Zers had, adjusted for inflation, roughly 25 percent more wealth than Gen Xers and Boomers had at a similar age.

Moreover, analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that the median household net worth of older Millennials more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. For young Millennials born in the 1990s, the gains were even greater.

The Fed data further show that the wealth of Millennials and older Gen Zers, as of early 2024, “stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier.” This was driven up mainly by real estate and the value of........

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