The popular narrative is that baby boomers rode cheap houses and 401(k)s to wealth, dismantled the welfare state behind them, and left everyone else to fight over scraps. But conflating boomers and conservatives lets the latter off the hook for 25 years of tax cuts and disinvestment in children. It erases the Black boomers, poor boomers, and pensionless workers who never got a slice of that wealth. And it lays the groundwork for the one policy outcome its loudest advocates actually want: gutting Social Security. Who really benefits when you decide your parents' generation is the enemy?

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