By 1964, all 75 million boomers had been born – and the United States had only 191 million people in it. Boomers made up about 40 percent of the country…
Although no one ever sat down and calculated it, this critical number – 40 percent – would give a rough idea of baby-boom power as the generation passed through the various stages of life. Boomers started voting in the 1966 elections, and by the time Ronald Reagan chased Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, they were casting 40 percent of the votes. Two years later they were at 43 percent.
The boomers were sometimes polarized on major issues, it is true. But on any matter that united them, it required a near-unanimous resistance movement to stop them. That is why politicians made the country liberal on sex in the 1970s, when the boomers were mostly in their twenties; business-friendly in the 1980s, when the boomers were mostly in their thirties; and investment-friendly—starting with Bill Clinton’s second term—in the 1990s, when the oldest boomers were entering their fifties.
This was important, because the boomers’ command over the economy would wind up more impressive than their command over the political system. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the boomers were between 25 and 43, entering their most energetic adult years just as America was being called on to write the rules for the global economy. When they were in their prime, in the prosperous 1990s, they made up well over half the workforce.