The Most Entitled Generation? I Think We Can Pinpoint it Though

This is a pretty good takedown of the "Millennials are entitled" myth:

True entitlement is tripling the national debt since the 1980s and using the proceeds to spend lavishly on tax cuts and government programs that primarily provided short-term economic boosts, while refusing to raise the Social Security age of retirement or to reduce benefits, even as the gluttonous program careens toward unsustainability.

AAP Image/NEWZULU/ZOEA protester at recent Australia climate-change rallies in the lead up to the UN climate summit in New York.

True entitlement is allowing the reasonable minimum wage that Baby Boomers enjoyed when they were our age to deteriorate while opting to cut taxes on the gains from stocks and bonds that they accrued during periods of debt-driven economic and stock-market surges — creating an economy where wage earners at all income levels, as of 2012, receive a smaller portion of economic output at any time since 1929.

True entitlement is, for decades, enjoying the benefits of the lowest energy costs in the world while refusing to price-in the external costs of carbon emissions, exacerbating the real changes to our planet that pose profound risks to the environment and economy for which millennials will soon be the primary stewards.

These grave consequences were entirely foreseeable — but they happened. Young Americans have been fleeced in order to fund the transient excesses of the old — and yet millennials are labeled “entitled” because we were given “participation trophies” and “personal tutors” before we were old enough to vote ... ?

Give us a break. Millennials are not entitled. But we are frustrated.

I'll be a little less kind. It's not about some faceless economy. It's about Reaganism. It's about the last 35 years being an assault on collectivism. It's about letting our institutions rot because you wanted a tax cut. It's about not pushing an increased minimum wage that kept up with inflation. Yes, it's about fighting wars against anything that was uncomfortable, crushing off the civil rights movement after the 1960s, killing the environment, de-regulating the economy, pushing the war on drugs and police state, and after all of that, insisting on balanced budgets. I hope those tax cuts were worth it. Where millennials are at is entirely predictable once their parents embraced the poison of Reagan-conservatism.