Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Letter to the editor: Baby boomers are the lucky ones

Re: “ Property tax idea from a B.C. senior ,” comment, June 4. Like many who aren’t baby boomers, I was astounded by the suggestion that a below-cost loan from taxpayers to keep the writer in his $1.2 million property was not enough.
Generic Real Estate

Re: “Property tax idea from a B.C. senior,” comment, June 4.

Like many who aren’t baby boomers, I was astounded by the suggestion that a below-cost loan from taxpayers to keep the writer in his $1.2 million property was not enough.

Previous generations, after suffering through two World Wars and the Great Depression, set up programs in all areas of life (healthcare, education, and housing, for example) to ensure that their boomer children would never undergo similar hardship.

Western boomers are the luckiest generation in human history and hide from the fact that their children are materially worse off in almost every way by fantasizing elaborately about “entitled” millennials who can’t afford to buy houses or raise families or start businesses because they buy too much avocado toast.

Can anything be more entitled or more shameless than receiving a massive windfall and trying to pass the burden of paying for services for an aging population onto a generation that has already been crippled by boomers pulling the ladder up after them?

Regardless of whether the writer continues to take advantage of below-cost loans to stay in his home or elects to sell his property and move into a condo, he has it better than a good number of the young working people he expects to pay for his roads and healthcare. Maybe he should think about how to leave something for the next generation instead of looking to the U.S. for new ways of pandering to pharaonic greed.

Max Kühn

Victoria