“Very interesting. I think a lot of Baby Boomers are going to find that the whole promise of “retirement” was nothing more than a con job. The idea that someone could retire at 60-65 and then go on living for another 25-30 years without doing anything productive was never sustainable.”
Your assertion is false. With good policies, the baby boomer retirements could have been reasonably secure. However, we have not had reasonable policies espcially since 2009. Most of the money contributed to payroll taxes should have been saved, not spent. If the contributions had been spent and reasonable constraints would have been placed on government, retirements would be reasonable secure.
The most interesting part of this situation is the utter disregard that baby boomers have had for their own retirement. We have seen the problems of entitlement spending festering for decades. Baby boomers have allowed the rats to demoagouge the issue. The greatest generation (as a whole) has been a determined voting block against reform but baby boomers could have easily voted against fiscal irresponsibility. The greatest generation has skimmed good returns from the entitlement programs without any regard to the sustainability of the programs. The political class has skewed the debate over entitlements that liabilities (trust fuund) are somehow considered assets. I see little hope in any meaningful reform. Privatization is the only answer but it has been eliminated from consideration by liars, thieves, and demagouges.
Yes, the responsible allocation of trust fund payments would have helped the situation. But the simple truth is that no human society in history has ever been able to function well with large numbers of its members living for extended periods of time without working productively. Heck, the whole concept of "retirement" is nothing more than a construct of the modern welfare state.
If you were to go back through human history and had access to the kind of statistical data needed to make these comparisons, I bet you'd find that the Western "super-states" of the 20th century were the first societies ever to see their average life expectancy exceed the productive working age of their populations.
With good policies.
Where the tax money comes from and where the tax money goes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/budget-2010/
We haven't had reasonable policies for thirty years. The housing bubble and all the other bubbles didn't start in 2009. This federal govt. has been gorging itself on the nation's wealth for decades and promising things it knew it couldn't deliver. Please, don't try to equate this with dems. The GOP has been part of the problem for decades.