I am sure this was a rhetorical question and you probably know the answer... it was spent on the Great Society to buy demorat votes with your money, it was spent to prop up other spending programs, it was wasted to create a dependent class of pets for demorat power. Some blame all this largess and waste on the boomers themselves who rose to public office. THAT is a rather flimsy argument since the Boomers began with Clintoon... the die had been cast and the pattern set starting with Roosevelt and polished off by the Greatest Generation in the likes of Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and LBJ (b. 1908). You can thank tricky Dick for inflation when he took us off the gold standard. I hardly remember inflation mentioned before that. You can also thank him for the seeds of the 401 that Ronald Wilson Reagan polished off and gave the money changers a jackpot goldmine to feed of self-directed investor money and make money on both sides of the trade win or lose and then there are all those tasty management fees.
It was never enough to start with though my contributions over the last 40 years would provide the equivalent of about $36,000 a year plus about 3% inflation for a long long time at a constant 6% rate of return... if there were such a thing.
The money is not there though, it is all gone and will never be back. The system is dead, we are just hovering over a corpse waiting on an unwelcome declaration of death. It was spent and squandered and we our boomer generation neither saved enough nor produced enough offspring to make up the difference. Collectively, we are headed for work until death or can’t and the largest population of geriatric indigents the world has ever seen.
80 million boomers will sell to or will what wealth they have acquired to 50 million Gen-X who will be selling to and leading 75 million Gen-Y. Boomers are like a chicken going through a snake. A big bulge steadily being reduced to a pile of crap.
” You can thank tricky Dick for inflation when he took us off the gold standard. I hardly remember inflation mentioned before that. “
Inflation had already been a problem for at least a decade before Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. It just wasn’t as visible as it became after Nixon.
Inflation is why silver was removed from American coins after 1964 and silver certificates were removed from circulation. The value of the silver exceeded the face value of the money.
The root of the inflation was something called the Triffin Dilemma, a problem caused by the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. It would have been necessary to contract the American money supply to defend the value of the dollar, but neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor Nixon were willing to endure the hard recession that would follow.
One result of all this is that there was a dual price for gold during the 1960s, the official conversion price and the free market price. The French didn’t believe that this situation would last so they started demanding gold for their dollar holdings. This increased the pressure on the dollar and Nixon decided to ‘resolve’ the situation by breaking the last link of the dollar to gold. Ironically enough I think you will find Milton Friedman suggesting that Nixon do exactly that.