saving for retirement at age 48? That’s a bit too late to do anything of significance.
Also saying the youth is a drain is false as well, who else is going to work at McD’s and Walmart? Retirees and young ones.
I’m not dissing that type of work, but typically the minimum wage jobs are done by those types of people...without them we’d have to pay a lot more for our goods/services.
How many jokes have I heard that teenagers are what propped our economy, buying fast food, clothes, movies, and over priced concert tickets?
“Youth as a drain” is a relative term. It is better said that youth progresses from being an absolute drain (children) to being a non-contributor (early 20’s) when their earning power is low and many of them are saddled with student debt, so their discretionary income is low and their spending effect and multipliers are low.
From the standpoint of consumption of large, durable goods (cars, boats, housing, furnishings, etc) people start consuming in earnest in their mid-30’s and taper off quickly after 50. By the mid-50’s, people quit buying second homes and start divesting themselves of “stuff” to get their burn rate pared down for retirement.
The main cohort of boomers is well into their 50’s now, and their patterns of consumption are going to contract very quickly after this financial shock. You can see the American rate of savings going up very, very rapidly in the Fed’s “Fred” database:
You can see where people’s savings went negative in 2005, as they strip-mined equity out of their houses. And you can see how quickly savings have shot up in aggregate.
This rapid turn-around of people into savers is what threatens any consumer-led recovery. A turn-around in consumer behavior as rapid and as large as this is going to break more than a couple models and assumptions about US consumer behavior going forward.
Yeah I would think a tendency to spend less at 48 is more due to wanting to accumulate less stuff. Or spending all their money on the kids. :D