Recent Wage Reductions and Two-Tier Pay Structures=Explicit Rejection of American Dream

A key component of "The American Dream" is for one's children to do better than oneself economically. However, the Baby Boomer generation relentlessly pursued a policy of driving wages down, explicitly and specifically deciding that the following generation would do worse. There are many factors that brought wages down; primary strategies included using outsourcing and illegal immigrant labor as leverage to keep wages down in newer jobs and coerce wage cuts in the older jobs that had guarantees.

You can't say "we want the next generation to do better so let's pay them less." Or at least you don't make sense if you do. What the Boomers have said very clearly though is "let's pay them less." That they want the next generation to do worse, or at least that they frankly don't give a damn, follows quite obviously from that declaration. Thus we can fairly say that the Baby Boom generation rejected the American Dream, at least for their children. Of course, not every Boomer was in on the decision, the great mass of them are guilty, rather, of letting it happen while they weren't paying attention or voting wisely.

It is easy to see why they were complacent; an unprecedented number of them came from prosperous, middle-class households. Good jobs were relatively plentiful, even for those without college degrees, plus degrees were easy enough to obtain since college was largely subsidized. That's right, college degrees weren't even required for many of the good jobs, yet it was also possible to obtain an education without, at the very same time, obtaining a gigantic debt load.

Appallingly enough, it appears they stole the future from their progeny both by removing many of the ways society helped people up (i.e. cheap education), while also making it more difficult to move up by going directly to work by driving wages down to the 9-12 dollar an hour range. It seems that they (the Boomers) had good jobs and their retirement set, so why spend a whole lot of time worrying about the big, fat crap sandwich their kids would have to eat at adulthood. Of course normal human beings would have been very concerned about what kind of world their kids would face, but Boomers aren't normal, they are America's Worst Generation.