Posted on 12/11/2007 5:35:10 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
Depends on your definition of "available." The Pill was offered for sale in 1959. 1964 was when the Supreme Court decided Griswold. v. Connecticut, which prohibited states from banning contraception (and which first recognized a claim of a right to privacy, thus setting the stage for Roe v. Wade).
Often forgotten is that the phrase "baby boom" is shorthand for "post-war baby boom." For 15 years of Depression and war, folks put off starting a family. In the late '40s, '50s and early '60s, with the war and Depression over and prosperity the order of the day, those folks made up for lost time.
His mother would've been 19 in 1961, so he could've been born in 61 which would make him a boomer.
August 4, 1961, to be specific.
Demographers use the phrase "age cohort" rather than "generation" to be more precise. The definitions are necessarily arbitrary, putting older and younger siblings in different "generations," which is obviously at odds with the usual definition of the word. But as a general rule, folks who start having kids right after the war usually finished having kids in the '60s. Which is, presumably, about the time mama Obama started having kids.
The most common lines are the "baby boomers" born between 1946 ad 1964, inclusive; "Generation X," born between 1965 and 1980, and "Generation Y," from 1981 to 2000-something. I don't know what name has been given to today's toddlers and preschoolers.
My generation grew up with Star Wars -- Boomers made it and starred in it. So either could be described as the "Star Wars generation," as Obi-Wan once said, "from a certain point of view."
I am a Boomer. Face it Boomers, we are no longer “cool” and we never were. Our generation produced liberal Boomers who have done nothing but create some good music, and at the same time, have set out to destroy all that is good about a great nation.
For that I feel sorrow.
As long as we continue to invest in the future there is no reason to fear it.
Can I have some of what ever you're smokin'?
Looking through old family photo albums from 1970 and earlier: People (especially women) in their mid twenties look at least mid thirties, people in their 30s look as if they're pushing 50, and those in their 50s look every bit of 70something. It's partly due to the outmoded clothes, hairstyles, and makeup techniques, but the faces look older due to intrinsic factors, too. Young women of 25 had deep marionette lines that they usually don't develop till at least 10, quite possibly 20 years later today. Easier lives, less likely to smoke, and knowledge that a healthy tan is an oxymoron are a few of the reasons.
I must be a totally different “breed” of Boomer, myself. I was born in 1960. Joined the Army in 1977, retired in 1997. Can’t stand people on either end of the spectrum; the Hippies or the total Consume-aholics. I can live a very simple life without any gadgets, aside from my computer...because it makes me money. :)
Other than that, I have very little in common with other Boomers around me. I like self-sufficiency where possible, I give to charity quietly, and I, too, don’t need my name on a building...but I do like to see it on stock certificates, LOL!
Don't romanticize the retirement of prior generations. The intent of picking 65 as the retirement age was that people that age were really old - the survivors after half of their generation had already died of old age. So the intent was that half of the people would get no retirement at all. And because of their different life expectancy statistics, that is and was even more true of blacks than of whites.And if you think "defined benefit" retirements are a walk in the park, you haven't considered that "defined benefit" is a synonym for "fixed income." And what the sort of inflation unleashed in the 1970s did to the purchasing power of those "defined benefit" fixed incomes that looked adequate when middle aged people were planning to retire on them in the fifties and sixties. We're retired, and we have the resources for a comfortable retirement until and unless we get huge medical bills over and above insurance - and unless inflation eats our purchasing power alive. The issue we face is how to hedge against those risks.
The worst threat of inflation is the so-called "Social Security Trust Fund" which does not represent savings for Boomer retirement but only constitutes a record of money which the government has already spent and therefore owes "to itself" to pay out in Social Security benefits. When the current accounts cash flow of Social Security turns negative within a decade, taking the bonds out of the SSTF vault would only mean printing the money and driving inflation. At that point the only viable response will be to throttle back on all entitlement programs, including Social Security. Unfortunately we will still have Democrats promoting the illusory solutions of economy-killer tax rates which will fail to increase revenue, and/or geometrically increasing the dollar supply and issuing wage-and-price "controls" in a vain attempt to mask the concomitant destruction of the value of the dollar.
In short, the pending Retirement Boom sets us up perfectly for a reprise of the 1970s. I shudder at the thought of all the Democratic retirees and impending retirees who have promoted the SS "Trust Fund" swindle which they knew or should have known is nothing but a fraud perpetrated on their own children and grandchildren.
I'm 51. The retirement options available to me have been "defined contribution" approaches from the beginning. I've paid maximum social security taxes nearly all my working life. I've paid off my mortgage and saved as much as possible for retirement. That said, I don't expect to be retiring before about age 70. I'll probably die first. The social security money stolen from my paychecks and redistributed or spent immediately will never be returned...neither the principal or any interest I might of earned had that money been placed in a decent investment.
The pending retirement boom is going to be underway and doing damage long before I'm ever even eligible to "retire". The tax increases that will be thrown my way are simply going to make it even more difficult to responsibly save for what little "retirement" I might ever enjoy. It pisses me off to no end to hear all the whining about "boomers". I've always paid my way (and paid for scads of other slackers too). In spite of that, I expect to get a royal screwing.
“I have been studying Spanish for the last several years. Do I need to study harder?”
Depends on what US state you live in now.
It’s not like the Boomers are printing stories about other boomers and how they are now 50. Can they be 50 already?
I love hearing the X’ers bellyaching about eating mush and working 80 hours a week to support my yacht payments. I’m worth it. Now shut up and pay yer taxes.
Medicine being what it is nowadays, you stand a good chance of reaching 70 in relatively good health. Consequently if you need to change careers now, it is actually not necessarily too late to do so, if you believe in yourself and know what you want to do.But of course the message of Social Security is that you are washed up at 65. Which seemed a lot more sensible sixty years ago than it does today.
LOL! Dude! LOL! :)
If I choose to retire from my current hardware/software engineering work with 70 hour weeks, it will likely be to a teaching position at the local university. I enjoyed teaching college classes from 1980 to 1983. It was extra money to supplement my entry level salary at PacBell. I had to stop teaching when I moved 45 miles from the college and shifted to an IT job with 24/7 on call status for 9 years.
“Boomer emotional immaturity, Boomer spiritual bankruptcy. Sorry, I’m sick of it; it’s all yours.”
How old are you?
Far TOO old.
It is beyond me how so many Boomer participants in the ALPB forum consider it "creepy" to call these miscreants "mis-leaders". After all, they have been misleading the entire flock of the ELCA into all sorts of heresy, spiritual and moral decay, and just plain ideological nonsense for 20 years. In more recent ALPB threads, some of the "good guys" on the ALPB forum (who apparently refused to participate in the mudfest that was the discussion about FR) have come back to say that those we Freepers call "trolls" and "disruptors" on ALPB have plunged that forum into all sorts of "bickering" and "name-calling". So the better elements on the ALPB forum basically agree that it is not "creepy" at all to refer to the few liberal agitatiors as "disruptors". Perhaps the ALPB forum will also come around to admitting that Hanson et al are "mis-leaders", and that Lutheran Freepers are the upstanding orthodox pastors and lay leaders that we in fact are.
I, being a Boomer, would be classified by most as a "straight-arrow". But some consider me to be the biggest (right-wing) radical of all, since I demonstrated against the 1999 war against Serbia, and have been an activist on Serbian causes ever since. So it goes!
Boomers brought us the GOP congress. “Greatest Generation” brought us decades of Democratic control. ‘Nuff said.
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