Great Post!
Posted on 06/21/2018 2:19:46 PM PDT by rickmichaels
Lately I’ve been losing track of how old everyone is. Friends, co-workers and family members are resisting middle age with vigorous exercise, careful diets and regular doctor visits. Even when 50-year-olds look like they’re 50, they often dress or party as if they’re still in their twenties.
Our capacity to fetishize youth never ceases to amaze. But while older Americans definitely want to look like younger folks, they certainly don’t want their finances. That’s because the wealth gap between generations keeps widening, and their children’s future is beginning to look ugly.
Just two years ago, the median American born in the 1980s — the cradle of millennials — had family wealth that was 34 per cent below what earlier generations held at the same age, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported last month. And all the data show it’s probably going to get worse.
As affluent baby boomers thank years of soaring markets for their paid-off mortgages and plump portfolios, millennials and the next cohort, Generation Z, are weighed down by student debt and stagnant wages. They can only contribute the bare minimum to their retirement plans and struggle to find affordable homes within commuting distance of their jobs.
Of course, it’s perfectly normal for people just starting out to have less in the bank. However, the St. Louis Fed warned that, even when taking that into account, young Americans are slipping dangerously behind. For a time, Generation X was also losing out, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. But its members managed to make up most of the shortfall in the years since, tapping into the longest economic expansion in decades.
For some reason that period of tremendous growth barely helped millennials. The St. Louis Fed called this anomaly “a missed opportunity because asset appreciation is unlikely to be as rapid in the near future.” That’s pretty bad news for twenty and thirtysomethings who may have been hoping to catch up. But it gets worse.
By 2034, Social Security won’t be able to pay out full benefits, the program’s trustees estimated this month. Any solution that would rectify its finances will probably require more taxes and more benefit cuts — all coming out of the pockets of younger workers. Boomers, who are exiting the workforce in droves, will already be comfortably seated when the music stops, or out of the picture.
Fixing Social Security is hardly the only issue where younger Americans have different priorities than their elders. U.S. President Donald Trump was elected on the votes of older Americans favouring tax cuts and less government, while young voters flocked to Senator Bernie Sanders, who supports rebuilding social programs and establishing national healthcare.
Alicia Munnell, the director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, recently lamented that government inaction on Social Security means “that most baby boomers have escaped completely from contributing to a solution.” This month, she offered some depressing advice to younger Americans about what they can do to make up the difference: Work longer.
The reaction to her earnest advice was rage.
“Wait, this is the good news?” read one indignant post on Twitter, echoing many others. Slate’s Jamelle Bouie called it “a great example of ‘we turned the economy into a miserable hellscape and you’re just going to have to deal with it.’”
Ouch. But Munnell assured young people that they don’t need to cancel their retirements entirely. “In fact, my research shows that the vast majority of millennials will be fine if they work to age 70,” she wrote for Politico. (Small solace given that life expectancy for Americans recently took a turn for the worse.)
Still, Munnell has a point. Across a generational time-frame, people are still living much longer than their parents. As my colleague Peter Coy recently pointed out, a man who is “chronologically” 65 is actually more like a 55-year-old from the perspective of 1957. With the extra years, a longer career doesn’t necessarily mean a shorter retirement.
Retirement-age Americans are already working in record numbers. Whether by choice or necessity, because of boredom or fear, a full third of those between 65 and 69 were in the workforce in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, along with 19 per cent of those aged 70 to 74 — together almost double the number 30 years ago.
Nevertheless, the retirement advice of “just work longer” can sound pretty tone deaf to younger ears, especially when the old American promises — of advancement, financial security and home ownership for everyone who works hard — have faded into myth.
What about the booming economy of 2018? Won’t that help smooth the path for young savers? Perhaps, but Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists recently said the current pace of the U.S. economy is “probably as good as it gets.” That can only make young Americans more furious about the “missed opportunity” mentioned by the St. Louis Fed.
Paycheques aren’t reflecting the improving economy. Hourly wages were unchanged in May from a year earlier. And according to a Fed survey, four in 10 Americans said it would be tough to come up with US$400 for an emergency expense. The same 2017 survey found 27 per cent skipping medical treatments because they can’t afford them. Another poll this month reaffirmed the inability of many Americans to save any money at all.
So work longer? First you have to live longer, and that’s not guaranteed.
Wide swaths of the country are getting sicker and dying younger than just a few years ago, with a widening health gap between educated, affluent Americans and everyone else. Alcohol abuse and obesity, upticks in suicide and an epidemic of drug overdoses have all played a role in an ominous milestone: Year-over-year declines in American life expectancy while the rest of the world lives ever-longer.
Perhaps it’s a statistical blip. If not, the U.S. faces an almost dystopian future — one of hyper class-stratification in which the few are rich and living longer while the many postpone retirement, struggle to get by and ultimately die younger.
There is some good news for younger generations, though. As they focus on the hand they’ve been dealt, they will find there is one good card to play, one that may allow them to address the myriad problems they face: numbers.
It’s no secret the widening gap in financial security is shadowed by a similar gap in politics, setting up the potential for generational warfare at the ballot box in coming elections.
The outcome of the 2018 midterms may largely come down to whether left-leaning millennials and Gen-Xers, who make up a majority of eligible U.S. voters, show up. In recent elections, these two demographics voted at much lower rates than previous generations at the same ages, according to the Pew Research Center. Unless that changes, wealthier, right-leaning baby boomers and the remaining members of the so-called Silent Generation will once again swamp them at the polls.
Regardless of turnout, or even who wins, academics predict a growing animus between young and old to match the polarized party politics currently roiling the nation.
“I think you’re going to see growing conflict,” said Susan MacManus, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of South Florida. One sign that “this huge generation is awakening to things is that we have seen record levels of younger candidates stepping up to the plate and running for office at every level,” she said.
And she said these young people, just now realizing how bad their prospects are financially, are increasingly angry.
The problem is not what generation these kids are in - it's the decisions they're making, and who they're listening to when they make those decisions.
They should be angry at their parents in the education system for telling them a big fat lie about how life works
They called the Clinton years the 8 year Vacation From History and we paid a high price for that vacation
The Obama year are going to be become known as America’s eight year Vacation From Reality and the whole world will paying the price for this vacation for decades
50 year olds are X-ers, not Boomers.
LMAO.
Instead they think they are being clever & smart by telling the President F you. Claiming that he is a racist, a Nazi, and he is Hitler on steroids. But I blame our educational system for them being so uninformed and gullible.
Great Post!
Why would the young be mad at those older?
We baby boomer types, paid sharply higher social security taxes all these years, in order to fund social security payments in our futures. We also had financial ups and downs and economic uncertainty, paid what at the time were high prices for housing, etc.
And generations before mine had to go fight in a war, in which they weren’t certain they would come home.
Every generation has had ups and downs is the point. Do today’s young people really have it so much worse? It depends on the criteria you want to talk about.
Among other things, many of today’s young adults grew up in homes which are luxurious compared to where their parents and grandparents grew up. Relatively few of today’s young have hard dangerous physical labor type jobs.
We could all say a lot about this . I’ll leave it at that.
My parents collected numerous pensions from the government. Military, civil service, etc...Dad left my mother where she never had to work a day in her life. She is 85. I don’t begrudge her that.
My wife and I will work until very close to when we die. I won’t be able to retire until almost seventy. We are boomers.
I get really tired of this whiny generational stuff that acts like whatever they postulate is a rule for everyone society wide.
Don’t be lecturing us “boomers”...all we did was live our lives, as best we could, under 28 years of liberal/RINO administrations.
It was OUR money they stole from Social Security, and have never paid back.
Tax and spend is what liberal/democrats do...they’re known well for it. Conservatives usually have to finally get in to straighten things out, and then everyone gets complacent and either puts a majority liberal congress in place, or elects another damn democrat for president.
You want someone to blame? Better study your history and look to the government...not the “boomers”. The “boomers” were probably your parents, or grandparents...you blaming them for “ruining your life”?
shaking head
I refuse to be blamed for the lack of self-discipline, lack of work ethic, lack of attitude to sacrifice in the short run to improve the future, and lack of personal responsibility exhibited by so many millennials.
Looking back on living in basement apartments, furniture was the >20 year old hand-me downs from relatives, or wood planks supported by milk crates and concrete blocks. The first 2-3 cars were very used, no AC, crank windows, AM radio.... We did NOT eat out. We did not present ourselves as being more affluent than we actually were. There was a pride in making it on your own and building your life as you went along.
I have worked for many, many years. My millennial children have college degrees, no debt, decent jobs, and they also work hard. They are not sitting around blaming someone for what they “don’t have”. Nothing has been handed to them.
It is too bad that the whiners get all the attention in this country.
That pic says it all.
In that pic, “Mark” isn’t a afraid to get his hands dirty. “Megan”, on the other hand, could never fathom the idea of actually “working” for a living.
A good pipeline welder in the Permian Basin or Eagle Ford makes more money in a year than most doctors, lawyers, etc. It’s hot, nasty, dirty work far from home, but the good ones really make a bundle. The smart ones sock it away.
This is not a zero-sum game.
I worked my a$$ off in ADDING VALUE for which I was compensated and then invested which has paid off dividends for my retitrement after 40+ YEARS of straight work.
I stole not a dime from any Millennial nor anyone else. I *certainly* held no gun to anyone’s head when they could not do basic math to determine if they should take out a loan against future earnings.
Let them come back after 40 years of work and THEN look at the situation.
But this article does a great job of perpetuating the notion (not a myth and not a stereotype) of whining Millennials who want it all handed to them.
.
More leftie fake news!
Your “Grim Future” is your own to craft!
(especially in the Trump Economy!)
Get a certificate or Associates from Lamar Institute of Technology in Beaumont Texas and the refineries will knock your door down trying to hire you.
Other schools in other states have similar programs.
Don’t get ripped off by Phoenix University or DeVry though.
Congratulations! Make sure you teach him how to keep his mouth shut and his opinions to himself under most circumstances. Said with all due respect.
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