Lol. A lot of that chaos had a lot to do with a Labour Government as well, as I remember? And here we are again. Yes, interest rates were higher. But higher interest rates on a debt that was a much tinier multiple of your household income still equate to a much lower proportion of your household income overall than paying lower interest rates on a debt that is a much higher multiple of your household income. And this time not for a decade, but in perpetuity.
There was also significant inflation during that period which meant that people’s mortgages pretty much inflated away. This only works, however, if the inflation is accompanied by corresponding salary rises. In the 1970s and 1980s that happened. Now, however, this is not happening and there has been barely any real-terms salary increase for the last two decades in most occupations. On top of this people have ever-increasing costs for childcare (because now the vast majority of families have two working parents: workforce participation is at its highest level since it started being measured properly in the early 1970s, despite the Boomers claiming young people are lazy slackers - the evidence shows a higher proportion of them are working and a higher proportion are working full time, than their parents’/ grandparents’ generation who are now retired). Meanwhile we have had charges imposed on education, housing costs going up by many multiples in real-terms, the economy and growth unnecessarily damaged further by Brexit (guess who was the largest cohort voting for that?), and taxes at an all time high since before the Boomers were born.
Your false equivalences will not wash, I’m afraid. Even without an economics background a look at some basic graphs will demonstrate to you that the above are all established economic facts which are indisputable. The pretence that somehow the retired generation had life harder is simply nonsense. Their parents’ generation had it very hard, who actually fought in the second world war, but very few of them remain.
The people I am talking about are their children, who have been a generation who lived in a time of huge opportunity, rising living standards and economic opportunity, opportunities for social mobility, and simultaneously sold off and trashed the country’s public infrastructure and public institutions and stripped everything to the bones like a pack of piranhas, pulled every ladder up behind them and now have the audacity to blame everyone else for objecting to impoverishing further the subsequent generations in order to keep them in luxury that they have neither paid sufficient money to fund nor funded for their own parents or grandparents who were far more deserving because they were the ones who set up all of the infrastructure and institutions that the current retirees benefitted from and then destroyed for those who followed.
The absolute refusal to accept to take any responsibility for their own choices when they were the ones making the decisions, their continued stranglehold on politics preventing any change that’s not for their own personal benefit despite knowing damn well that they are the first generation in history to have left their children worse off than they were, is quite disgusting. Obviously there are exceptions, but a large proportion of that generation are supremely entitled and selfish and seem to have convinced themselves that all of the economic data is falsified and somehow everything they have extracted from society is the fruit of their own labour. I’m afraid that it is perfectly clear to everybody else, and an indisputable fact, that this is not the case and as a cohort they have an enormous debt to the rest of society which they are going to have to start to repay now.