Posted on 10/08/2012 8:11:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Retirees and near-retirees are leaving behind a devastated economy for their children ... but are we doing anything to fix it? Here, two generations debate who's really to blame for the wreckage.
*****
CRESCENT LAKE, Ore.--My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.
His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.
This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
People forget that there is a generation before boomers, the silent generation of almost all the rock stars and young leaders of the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Jimmy Page, Joan Baez, Bill Alinsky and Bernadette Dohrn, Jane Fonda, The Chicago Seven, Janis Joplin, Bob Seeger, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison and so on, just about everyone that a person thinks was a boomer during the 1960s, was not a boomer at all.
Bravo, wardaddy! You tell ‘em!
Aren't we still first or second in manufacturing, having been knocked off the top spot only in 2011, with over 19% of the world's total?
never said I was junior...I tell you one thing..we may have rebelled against authority and created mayhem of all sorts but we didn't whine and blame fiscal matters on others and for God's sake we never had women drive us around
I deplore that when I see youngsters like yourself being chauffeured around by the women..it's so emasculated
These threads seem more thoughtful, more sophisticated, and more accurately historically, than they were 5 and 6 years ago.
I made an accurate statement, that many early Baby Boomers are now starting to take out many times what they put into Medicare—and you tried to correct me by saying that that was false.
Here is a document which shows the average Medicare recipient who turned 65 in 2010 taking out more than 3X what they put into the system:
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/social-security-medicare-benefits-over-lifetime.pdf
Oh, and BTW Ryan’s current plan allows people like you to stay in the system if you so choose.
It’s great for the 2010ers (and those before them): they put in only the light green, but they get the maroon back for Medicare.
It looks to me like the 2010 set gets the least return for their dollars, compared to those before them and those yet to come, as the 2030 chart shows.
Your chart seems to be the opposite of what you wanted to show.
They’re still getting something like 3X what they put in.
That is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme and it shows exactly what I said, which is that they’re starting to get several times their money back just like the generation before them.
They’re still getting something like 3X what they put in.
That is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme and it shows exactly what I said, which is that they’re starting to get several times their money back just like the generation before them.
BINGO! Nailed it! Kudos to YOU!
There was even a Time magazine article from 1950 decrying the so called ‘Silent Generation’.
The ‘Silent Generation’ were too young to fight in WWII and too old to fight in Vietnam.
Harry Reid...San Fran Nan... Silent Generation.
The Silent Generation, 1925-1945 saw lots of war, the oldest in WWII, then Korea, and a lot of Vietnam, millions were drafted and served, but they were also the main figures of the hippie 1960s, that most people think of as boomers.
The Silents have always had that chip on their shoulder—their whole lives they have been sucking the dust og the GG.
They never elected a President. They have just wrecked everything.
Read “The Fourth Turning.” I had my wife listen to the audiobook on a long drive. By the time we got home she hated the Silents, was sick of the boomers, and was scared for our Millenial kids.
The study of generational attributes does not suggest a good time between now and 2020.
Sucks to be us.
Boomers didn't invent SS, and they didn't invent Medicare. Their parents did. Don't like it, go tell it to your great grandpa, if he's still alive, and the rest of the felonious "greatest generation" who colluded with "New Deal" FDR, "New Frontier" Kennedy, and "Great Society" Johnson, before boomers ever had a chance to vote on any of it.
We’ve gone from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Manufacturing hasn’t completely disappeared but it’s just not what it once was. I’m 56 and I can remember factories and small machine shops in my town and the surrounding area of Northern New Jersey were I grew up. Heck, I remember hear the noon-time whistle and the five o’clock whistle. When I graduated high school in ‘75, a lot of my friends who took mechanical drawing(remember that?) got jobs as machinists in tool and die shops. Those days are gone. Can you name one electric appliance made in America anymore?
If we are first in the world, or second for the very first time in 2011, we must be doing an awful lot of manufacturing.
Being neck and neck with China as we each account for about 19.5% of the world’s total, shows that we are still a manufacturing giant.
I agree, being the number one manufacturing nation in the world except for 2011 (2nd), and manufacturing almost 20% of the world’s stuff definitely means that manufacturing isn’t dead in America.
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