You had a good article going. Yes we have a crisis coming, and it will be bad. But then you had to make your proposal that the reasons for all our struggles are because of boomers. Wrong.

This age warfare is going to cause immense fights going forward. The chart you show is primarily a timeline of lifetime earnings. Boomers have more wealth than GenX, for example, for a couple of quite simple and logical reasons.

First, boomers are a much larger generation than GenX, so the greater wealth is held by more people.

Second Boomers are just finishing their prime working years between the ages of 40-60 which is when most people make most of their money, which is also the period when they save and invest the most. The smaller GenX population, on the other hand, is just entering their prime working years, so their wealth will be growing much faster than other generations for the next 20 years. In addition, Xers haven't been saving at the rate of boomers because they are in their child-rearing years, and early in their careers. Saving rates are low in the US until people get closer to retirement.

Note that the smaller silent generation has less than Boomers also, but for them part of the reason is that after retirement, wealth declines, and people die.

Note also that Millenials have much less than GenXers. If Boomers are somehow oppressing the opportunities of GenXers, then GenXers must be oppressing Millennials, no? No. Millenials don't have much wealth because they are just starting their careers. It is actually a normal situation.

Pick up a standard Econ textbook and I'm sure you'll find a chart of lifetime income by age cohort and it will look a lot like yours.

I get really frustrated with age war analyses. When I was 45 I had total wealth of -70K. But I had just finished my Ph.D. and I parlayed that into nest egg of about a million. In most of my jobs, I was always one of the older employees, so there were plenty of Xers and millenials making as much as me. But I had had more time to save and invest, so undoubtedly I had more wealth. When they retire I'm sure they will have more than me.

If you want to start a culture war, you should focus on the income inequality between the top 1% and the rest of us. Most are probably boomers, but most boomers are not in the 1%. Most boomers are not rich. The long bar for boomers in your chart is skewed by the 1%. Take those out, and I predict you'll find cross-generational differences drop substantially.

By the way, the bars you show are for populations that are very different in a lot of ways, but most importantly by size. As such your chart doesn't say much when you focus on total aggregate income. If you want to present a more informative chart, it should be per capita.

If you do look at wealth figures per capita, the numbers are not as drastic. However, data is showing that the growth in income and wealth over the last 30 years has been much greater for those in the boomer cohort. But, again, the same data will show that almost all of that growth was sequestered by the 1%. It always comes back to that. If income inequality in general had stayed at about what it was in 1970, about 50 trillion more would have been distributed to lower-earning segments, and the change in the generational gap would be much smaller or even non-existent.