Go to a land grant state university that gets massive research funding from the government for almost no tuition
Be able to afford it with a part-time job and graduate with zero debt.
Get a high-paying job in manufacturing as the industrial world still rebuilds but before the developing world develops.
Put your money in a savings acount that actually generates interest.
Get a mortgage from heavily-regulated lenders (regulations put in place by the Greatest Generation to prevent a new Depression).
Pay taxes that actually pay for services.
Get a house and kids. Decide you're sick of paying taxes.
Vote for Reagan.
Eliminate the finance regulations designed to prevent a depression (and the inequality of the Gilded Age).
Decide colleges are turning out too many smug liberals, vote for reps and governors who promise to cut their funding. Besides, this whole affirmative action thing is reverse racism.
Decide you're sick of smug academics and TV personalities telling you everyone is equal. Call your representative and ask them to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.
Decide you don't like that UN-loving Ted Turner and his CNN. Turn on this new thing called Fox News from Roger Ailes, the Nixon political hack who helped build the Republicans' racist Southern Strategy and helped Lee Atwater make the Willie Horton ad.
Make a fuck-ton off the Clinton economy while calling Clinton the worst president ever.
Celebrate the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the final vestiges of the protections your parents and grandparents' generations set up to prevent another Depression.
Respond to news stories about skyrocketing college costs with smug diatribe about how you worked your way through your $500/year college.
Blame NAFTA for the fact that Europe & Japan rebuilt after WWII, sapping US manufacturing jobs, while the former USSR joins the world economy, as does China and to some extent India. Ignore the fact that the world manufacturing base is now gigantic and America has competition it never had. Also ignore robots, which means rich countries need a fraction of the # of humans to run the same size factory as before. Blame it on immigrants, too, for reasons.
Make money off the tech bubble while Gen X loses its first savings account. laugh.
Vote for George W. Bush because he promises to give the federal surplus (yes, there was a surplus) to you instead of paying down the national debt.
Inequality reaches 1890s levels but who cares? greed is good.
Support Iraq after protesting Vietnam because fuck it, you're not going this time.
Somehow decide the 2007-08 financial crash was because things are too regulated.
Incoherently argue that the center-left Democrat Barack Obama (but you always say his middle name), who wants to accomplish an agenda item the democrats have pushed for 70 years, is a radical. For some reason.
Cheer on smug turtle Mitch McConnell as he prevents the government from doing anything.
Call Obama a dictator for trying to work around Mitch McConnell.
Read about how whites will be a minority in 2040
Talk about how Trump is "our last chance" to "take back America." Ask what's wrong with saying black people are more criminal. Ask what's wrong with saying latino immigrants will ruin our culture.
Insist to your kids, who are crippled by student debt, but whom you chastise for not having a home or kids yet, that they just don't understand how money works.
Be completely ignorant that every generation before you and every generation after you has always considered the Baby Boomers to be the most titanically selfish group of humans to ever live and die on this earth.
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