Posted on 01/18/2008 9:21:42 PM PST by forkinsocket
The Baby Boomers’ retirement will change the texture of society in ways we’ve scarcely begun to contemplate. A dispatch from America’s coming silver age
It is cliché to speak of sleepy little country towns, but my mother’s hometown goes beyond sleepy into Rip van Winkle territory. Newark, New York, has more churches than bars. Neat clapboards and stately Victorians line quiet streets wrapped tight around the Erie Canal. Drive through Newark quickly, and it looks like America’s past. Stay a little longer, and you begin to recognize it as our future.
Walk into one of those churches on a typical Sunday morning, and you will find only a few, startling islands of brown or blond hair amid a sea of gray. Almost 20 percent of the population is over the age of 65. (The town’s economic fortunes have declined along with those of the Erie, and many younger workers have left.) On the street where my mother grew up, and my aunt now lives, the only children you see are visiting their grandparents.
The former Midlakes Middle School, which sits in neighboring Phelps, has transmogrified into “Vienna Gardens,” a private independent-living facility where my grandmother now lives. The bones of the schoolhouse are still clearly visible under the carpet and overstuffed couches that line the halls; the residents take their meals in the cavernous former gymnasium. Vienna Gardens is home to 64 people, but the place has an empty feel. The rent is out of the reach of many of the area’s seniors.
Those seniors, eventually, may end up at the county nursing home. It is a new and lovely facility. But its supervisors are leery of slipping into the red; most of its residents are on Medicaid, and the program’s meager payments don’t cover costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
And they don't need constant doctor visits, hospitalization and surgeries. Now multiply that times a jillion.
Boomers aborted a good segment of the young people.
Reality bites.
At least twice in this article a backlash against immigration was mentioned. I see no backlash against LEGAL immigration. It’s the illegals stupid.
I never knew that Buffalo once boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in America. My how times change.
Of course the elephant in the room in virtually every gloomsaying article like this is that the United States’ aging problem, though real, is very different from that of most other countries. Many other nations will see greater aging and slower young-cohort growth, as well as lower population growth. Many will see a population stagnation, or even decline.
In contrast, while the percentage of Americans over 65 will reach around 20% by 2030, the population under 20 will have grown by 15 million since 2000, and that population’s percentage of total population will have increased. (By 2050 we’ll add another 15 million to that total, and its percentage of the workforce will further increase.) The working-age population (20 to 64) in 2030 will be 30 million larger than it was in 2000, and by 2050 it will be 60 million larger.
Comparing this to Newark and “aging” towns and their local economies is simply an exercise in fiction. The U.S. has an issue with a shift in the number of workers per retiree. The U.S. does _not_ have remotely the same sort of shift that most other nations have otherwise because its population will be ballooning. That is a million miles from a prescription for a laid-back slide into hum-drum land, where things are nice and growth is okay but innovation and energy are gone.
And I forgot to mention that nations like China, against which we must significantly relatively decline according to articles like this, has an arguably more serious version of our own situation, seeing a massive chunk of aging population coming over the horizon and a proportionally lower increase in overall population. Yet when these same folk speak of China, it’s nothing but oohs and aahs over the dynamism the large youth population will bring to the country.
There is a serious problem regarding legal immigration into the USA too. The UK, US, CA, western-EU and AU have almost already sucked dry the existing medical community infrastructure in many 3rd world countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa. It comes down to a point where not only are the Western populations unwilling to pay for the education of their future nurses in their own countries, they are stealing the fruits of the taxpayers labors and school systems of third world countries to supply the current needs of Westerner’s desire for high medical care. But for the most part this well is running dry, not only are new nurses leaving sub-Saharan Africa, the senior nurses and instructor staff are also leaving their countries for jobs abroad, stripping much of the continent of the ability to develop the next generation of nurses for Baby Boomers to lure abroad with better jobs and living conditions.
The article wasn't particularly gloomy in my view. I thought it was balanced.
Won't worse effects of graying population growth in other countries end up making the US worse off, too? Has anybody crunched the numbers for globalized economic effects of a very old Europe and Asia and an aging America?
I will be glad to send him enough illegals to fill his entire town. Then he can enjoy the Wealth of Diversity.
“Boomers aborted a good segment of the young people.”
A tragic fact, but the Greatest Generation gave them the right and encouragement to do so.
“...the population under 20 will have grown by 15 million since 2000.”
Mostly unassimilating third-world illegals.
That’s the truth.
By the year 2020, 28% of my county’s population will be older than 65.
LIBERALS aborted a good segment of the young people. Last I heard, there were liberals in every generation. The people getting abortions today certainly ain't boomers.
Not as a whole, no. But there WILL be a significant shift in older population from big cities to small towns and rural areas, as retirees want to "get away from the rat race".
Due to a lot of building and rehabbing of existing properties, our valuations have increased while actual property taxes have only increased a bit, due to the larger population.We have 2 golf courses and some golf condos. There are 3-4 assisted living facilities and 2-3 nursing homes, but the majority of elderly live at home, many independently, the rest with family or hired health assistants.
Many people have begun new businesses, some agricultural, some service, some manufacturing. All of these have employees. We have an abundance of MDs and related health professionals, including nurses and every sort of medical technician and all are Caucasian Americans. I think we have 5 dentists, including one who specializes in orthodontics and another who specializes in children. One of our orthopedists is quite famous for his invention of a surgical device. We are short of surgeons,including dental surgeons, due to one being fired for poor performance and one having left because his wife couldn’t live rurally, forcing our original local surgeon to keep working even though he would prefer to retire (he is Filipino, a citizen and well-liked). We did have a Christian Turkish pediatric neurologist, but he left because his wife couldn’t deal with life in the rural Midwest. He was loved and is missed.
At last count, we had 5 private schools, 4 of them Christian.
There is the expected tension between born heres/came heres, but, all in all, things have improved in every area of life and vitality has returned and is becoming entrenched.
We do have illegal ag & construction workers, but I see fewer of them all the time. We have had the same construction slow down as elsewhere, but land has held its value even while McMansions are a glut on the market, as people find them expensive to heat/cool.
There will likely always be a portion of the population who desires rural life, independence, large families and who bring creativity and innovation with them. These doom 'n' gloom (tm) stories are overblown, IMO.
Now, having "made their nest egg", the older generation(s) are moving back OUT of the urban areas to rural areas and small towns. Since many of them don't NEED to work full-time (or even at all), there is "excess wealth" building up once again in the rural areas. Supplying the wants of these folks now starts to generate jobs for younger folks.
Add to the above the complementary increase in communications efficiency (internet, email, on-line video conferencing, etc., etc) along with UPS and FedEx and there is NO real reason for ANY business to any longer be located in megacities. Many small, entrepreneurial business are being established in small towns and rural areas some of whom will grow to world-class (Wal-Mart is probably the progenitor/exemplar???), along with a "world-scale" production plants established by existing world-scale industries (Toyota, and many others in the rural/small-town south). This process will only continue, and probably accelerate.
Will the increase in gas prices affect the trend in the long-term??? I don't think so. The "energy crisis" will be solved (if it hasn't been, in embryonic form, already--see "Nanosolar" who is bringing to market a solar cell with a probable $1/watt installed cost).
How many people REALLY want to live in downtown New York City, Chicago, etc.???
Absolutely.
I have one quibble, though: there has always been excess wealth accumulation out in the boonies. Over the past 10 years, as parents have died, many of their children have been stunned to find that mom/dad left $500k in cash, along with the farm (now worth $400k on average). Several people have told us that their parents never traveled, never lived lavishly, and never trusted banks. They found cash stashes all over the farm!
Even those who did trust banks tended to put their money in CDs and Treasury bonds. You would never guess to look at them or to evaluate their lifestyle, but these folks are millionaires.
I also know of a couple of family business that began in the old pole shed with no financing due to age or the banks’ erroneous assessment of their viability and are today reeling in government contacts, etc to provide a very comfortable living. One such entrepreneur told us that his kids have no idea if they are worth a few thousand or a few million and they aim to keep it that way, in order that those young adults work instead of counting on inheritance.
We do things differently out here. The BMW driver may not even realize what a 3/4 ton pickup can cost, especially if you add in a blade attachment.
True, but THAT wealth wasn't being made available to generate jobs in the local area. Simply because, with ag mechanization, there just weren't as many people NEEDED. The new rural migration is providing both the cash AND the job generation. So in that sense, it's a different situation.
"The BMW driver may not even realize what a 3/4 ton pickup can cost, especially if you add in a blade attachment."
Wanna see one go into shock. Tell'em what a combine costs. Most urbanites have no idea how "capital intensive" any good-sized farming operation is.
Boomers means those born between approximately 1945 and 1965.
I'm well aware of precisely what a "Boomer" is. Rates of abortion post Roe vs. Wade have been roughly constant from year to year (unfortunately). There is zero evidence that Boomers have had a higher percentage of abortions than any other post RvW generation. So your attempt to paint Boomers as "more guilty" is simply bull-bleep.
If you want to fault a generation about abortion, fault the so-called "Great Generation", because they're the ones who were in power when Roe V. Wade was promulgated.
Not only abortion - they also family planned them out of existence.
ping for later
Excuse me, but the missing young people are the missing children and missing grandchildren of the boomers.
The next generation will have their own missing children and grandchildren.
The boomers taught their own surviving children that abortion was good.
I already acknowledged the great generation’s contribution in a previous post.
bump
People aren't anti-immigration they are anti-ILLEGAL immigration, and they don't want Muslims coming into the country.
“A young man ain’t got nothing in the world these days.”
It seems to me that the Hobson’s choice is one of either allowing the decrease in population and the inevitable and obviously negative implications that has on our economy and standing in the world, or open the spigot of immigration in order to keep up the population and growing the economy. I have no doubt that the powers that be have already selected the latter option, and I don’t know that it is the end of the world. The end of the northern European control of the democracy, but not necessarily the end of the US itself.
"Generations" typically start to have children around 20, and most of them fulfill childbearing around thirty. There have been at least three childbearing generations since the boomers.
Your premise is baloney.
Your point is empty.
So's your head.
Read this:
http://www.nrlc.org/factsheets/FS03_AbortionInTheUS.pdf
Note the table on the first page, which gives number of abortions by years.
Do you remember my original post, the one that set you off?
“Boomers aborted a good segment of the young people.”
Your reply sounded like you did not understand what a boomer was, so I explained.
“Boomers means those born between approximately 1945 and 1965.”
Then you went insane. Enjoy the trip.
A large part of boomers "came of breeding age" too late to have legal abortion available (R v W being passed in 1973). Note that even AFTER passage of R v W, abortion stayed relatively low, only reaching it's "plateau" in 1980.
Note too, that the number of abortions per year STAYED near that plateau from then until now, decreasingly slightly in recent years. The later "generations"---"X", "Y", and "Z" are much smaller than the BB generation, so, in order for the level of abortions to stay high, they had to have higher rates of abortion than the Boomers.
So your premise that the Boomer generations is somehow "more responsible" for abortion usage, is, as I said, baloney.
Now of that changes my statement.
A more accurate description of boomers would be, "the first generation raised on television."
This would mean a subset of those born between 1945 and say, 1958 would not have the typical boomer mindset.
Love the One You’re With, LOL!
August 19, 1946 - Bill
October 26, 1947 - Hillary
When the boomer population of retirees gets old enough and feeble enough that the glorious welfare state can’t support them, the state will put them to the needle and confiscate their assets in the name of children and fairness. Take it to the bank.
It proves your "statement" wrong.
Well I'm a boomer, and I always was pro-life. Every other boomer I know is pro-life. We all have families. It's the younger folks who have abortions.
In your imagination, LOL.
Yeah, no boomer ever had an abortion, LOL.
Of course some boomers have had abortions; just don’t blame us for what became commonplace after us.
If the children of boomers believe in abortion, why wouldn’t it be the boomers fault for teaching them that?
If children of boomers end up listening to gore grind bands and doing meth and getting piercings, is that our fault too? We didn’t know about such things.
Maybe you’re right. Why parent your children, they can’t learn a thing from you!
Please, you are missing what’s up with Britney today on E! Don’t let us bore you further.
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