This past January, somebody paid more than $1.2 million for a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle. This happened at an auction in Arizona, where it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.

OK, maybe it was an excellent investment. They’re not making ’70 Chevelles anymore, as far as I know – although the sweat-soaked, panicky folks at General Motors might be retooling the Impala assembly line at this very moment. Maybe that archaeological relic will sell again in a few years for twice as much.

But it’s definitely one more example of how we Baby Boomers can be expected to screw up the country’s economy and culture on our way out the door. The world has never before seen such a large wad of people hit 60 with so much money in their pockets, so much nostalgia in their hearts and such an alarming lack of judgment. We plan to vote for tax cuts every chance we get and spend the extra cash on cars, second homes and anything that John Lennon ever touched.

Cream is reuniting? And the old boys still sound just like the albums in our closets? Sure, we’ll pay whatever ticket price you say.

Add cars to the mix and you wind up with millionaires gathering in the desert, a cult based on four-barrel carburetors and the chance to catch a glimpse of Bob Seger. (He was reportedly on hand in Scottsdale. Once you have “Against the Wind” memorized, you’ve got lots of free time.)

That Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction in January set a record with $61.7 million in sales, and that’s not counting how much the Boomers spent on Iron Butterfly tapes to jam into all of those eight-track players.

I first looked into this topic when I saw an item about a guy turning down an Internet auction bid of $78,000 for a 1967 Plymouth GTX. A GTX? No, no, I thought; nobody cared about the GTX when it was new. The GTX is what you bought if there was no dealer nearby selling Pontiac GTOs. It’s bad enough that we have to be nostalgic for unsafe cars that were hard to drive. Let’s at least focus our nostalgia accurately.

Then I found out about the world of Barrett-Jackson, where you gain the power to travel back in time, but only if your checking account can stand the strain. In this strange realm, people think a 1963 Ford Falcon is worth $11,550, a 1972 Plymouth Duster goes for $25,920, a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville pulls down $27,000 and a 1969 Chevrolet El Camino is valued at $31,860.

To spend this wildly, first you have to amass way more money than you need. How have we done this? Let’s just say if Tom Brokaw ever felt like writing a sequel, “The Greediest Generation” has a nice ring to it.

It isn’t that we’re hard-hearted, it’s just that there’s so much stuff that we really, really need. I mean, how would you feel if you had to live in a house with only one DVD player?

To be fair, side events at the big auction also raised more than $2 million for charity. There’s the promising sign. Get a mob of rich Boomers together, mesmerize them with chrome wheels and exhaust fumes, and you can pry enough money out of their portfolios to do some good.

But the cars are the key. I know a guy who has worked hard and now, at the age of 65, just bought a mint-condition 1972 Monte Carlo with 27,000 miles on the odometer. He paid $8,500 for it. Before I knew about the world of Barrett-Jackson, I might have questioned the deal. Now I’m thinking it’s a steal.