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Monday, February 12, 2018

Generation War - A Smokescreen

The popular notion that baby boomers are wealth hoarders who have gained at the long-term expense of the young is unfair and unjustified, according to, Dr Beverley Searle, from the University of Dundee. The academic, who is head of geography and environmental sciences at the university, recently led a three-year study into the transfer of family wealth across generations.

She said the current trend for the inter-generational conflict, which usually pitches retirement-age baby boomers against so-called millennials, who are typically in their twenties and thirties, as a “smokescreen” that obscured greater social inequality and poor decisions by politicians. Dr Searle said that baby boomers, those born between 1945 and 1964, had benefitted from the inception of the welfare state, better housing opportunities, healthcare and lower taxes. However, she added it was policy that had driven the benefits that were now costing those still in work. Dr Searle suggested more funding could have been made available for health and social care if taxes and national insurance paid into the system by the Baby Boomer generation had been reserved. “The government choose not to do this, the government wanted instead to reduce taxes,” she said.

She said: “Baby boomers get blamed for the benefits they have enjoyed, such as better housing opportunities and access to universities, but it was the politicians who took the decisions on how the policies would be funded. The debate around inter-generational conflict is just a political smokescreen. It is diverting away from the politicians that have created these problems and it is unfair and unjustified that baby boomers get the blame. Governments have known about the baby boomers from the 1940s onwards. It is not like they are a surprise. These arguments about the inter-generational conflict are just trying to divert attention away from policy decisions which have been made over the years.” 

Dr Searle said that the value of housing had become a key focus of the debate. 
“Politicians want house values to increase so that people can use the equity, possibly to fund their care in later life. The problem is, it is the people behind them, the young, who are suffering because house prices are so high. There is an assumption that older people are hoarding all the housing wealth but this is not the reality. A quarter of housing wealth is held by those between the ages of 35 to 64-years-old who are also in the top 20 per cent of households in terms of incomes. This idea that baby boomers are being greedy and hanging on to their housing wealth doesn’t pan out in reality."

Dr Searle added that inequality lay “within generations” and not “between generations.”

https://www.scotsman.com/news/attacks-on-greedy-baby-boomers-are-unjustified-says-academic-1-4686858







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