Maybe it's the Boomers' fault

I once heard, in a more American context, that the Baby Boomers are the generation that got the legal drinking age reduced to 18 so they could drink when they were in college, then got it raised to 21 so their kids couldn't drink in college.

I think perhaps they're doing the same thing with the social safety net.

I've been complaining at some length about the fact that strengthening the social safety net doesn't even seem to be an issue in this election. I think that's because of the Baby Boomers. They're all approaching retirement age, so they have nice nest eggs saved up, and worst case could survive on their savings and the pensions that are already guaranteed to them. So that's why they're filling the op-ed pages with all this rhetoric on how the expectation of a 60s-70s-style social safety net is obsolete. Because they don't need it any more. They had it to catch them when they were just starting out, and now that they don't need it any more they're working towards dismantling it to deny the same security to those pesky kids.