Your comment reminded me of this cartoon - my husband and I had it on our refrigerator when our son was at the age that put him right in the middle of the burgeoning video gaming industry.
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.
So what do all these millennials plan to do to improve their future prospects? Band together and vote for Democrats?
“Social Security will go bust”
It won’t go bust since it will still take in about $800 billion/year in tax revenue by federal law.
Benefits will just get reduced.
Yep. To the young whipper snapper complaining who can’t find a job unless they can start at the top I say “Start at the bottom and keep paying into social security so I can keep getting a check. But don’t worry. I won’t be drawing much longer.”
So what do all these millennials plan to do to improve their future prospects? Band together and vote for Democrats?
I will be 69 next month. I am still working, because I want to. Pulling down 80K annually doing part-time work. I do not need to work, but it gives me structure and I still have enough free time to do what I want.
My two went to Tech college. They are gainfully employed and not living in my basement.
***************
Not only are they gainfully employed, they can probably work anywhere they want, have steady employment, and can perhaps eventually start their own business. Sounds like they are on a good track.
No body said it was going to be easy. Get with it if you want to succeed.
Also, there is no job that is beneath your perceived status.
Furthermore, just because you went to college and graduated doesn't mean that you know anything. Anything at all!
“Join the Nav,CG or the AF ,learn a trade and let the GI Bill pay for training if you even need it for a firm to pick you up!”
One of our grandson’s is a California poster boy. 6’ 180# of muscle, a good but not great athlete, blue eyed and very white.
In California, he is basically $crewed out of getting into a California college/university as he has made C’s in his non STEM classes. He has straight A’s in his STEM classes and was on in the Math Olympics every year in his middle school.
He is the family ET and on the block he lives on. He taught me in about an hour how really use an android tablet and phone. It only took about half an hour to help me get on board with my first Chromebook. He showed his former middle school how to print with Chromebooks via the cloud. He enabled me to do the same in minutes.
I have suggested that in his Senior year at a good private school to load up on Stem classes and Spanish classes.
Then, he can join the Navy or Air Force for one of their crypto/intel programs to merge with his Spanish knowledge. We will be fighting an intel war with the South of the Border elites for decades.
Then, after 4 years with a TS clearance, he can get a job with a private security firm that is used by our intel people. Or he can stay in the military to complete his 20 and then retire and be debt free.
Your comment reminded me of this cartoon - my husband and I had it on our refrigerator when our son was at the age that put him right in the middle of the burgeoning video gaming industry.
My oldest granddaughter just got her CPA and makes a good living. Her brother just joined the USAF and is training to become an F-15 mechanic. Their younger brother is in college and a major in business entrepreunership. Not a weeper in the bunch. Whiners whine.
Yes. All those Burnie lovin' idiots have been trained to transfer all failures of their own upon others while trying their best to rob their fellow citizens.
Pursue a field which you enjoy, which is in demand and that you are scholastically and personally able to master. Work hard and make your own responsible choices.
Why not Army or Marines? Just curious.
Spanish is good to know, but the military chooses the language they want you to learn if you go into languages. Spanish is a very low priority as so many already know it.
Computers are the way to go in the military. They need computer security bigly.
Everything will turn out fine. Millennial weenies can move into the baby boomers’ houses after they die, suck the marrow out of grandpa’s bones and sell Che t-shirts at yard sales.
Other Millennial kids look at me incredulously when I tell them that even McDonald's type jobs were tough to come by when I entered the workforce at the glut of the baby boom (1973).
In fact, I was in hog heaven when I landed my first job on a factory night shift which paid $2.10/hour, 25 cents over what was then the minimum wage.
Then I tell them that this and another part-time job (which paid a whole $2.50 per hour) paid my tuition and living expenses. Of course this type of schedule left me no time to get drunk or laid, which seems to be top priorities of college kids these days.
He’s wicked awake.
Understands classroom politics.
He’ll be just fine.
THanks though.
He’s there. Thanks. :)
“Not true. The baby boomer paid higher SS taxes to fund the “greatest generation’s” SS benefits since it is a pay as you go system. The greatest generation received far more than they paid in but that isn’t sustainable for the baby boom generation’s benefits. This is one area where the greatest generation wasn’t really all that great.”
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You skipped an entire generation in your dissertation.
.
It wasn’t the boomers. It was well before that. It was Wilson, the creation of the Fed, it was abolishing the gold standard. It was FDR and his socialist nanny state.
But since no one studies history, they have to blame it on someone. And by doing nothing, they also have themselves to blame.
Heh... a friend’s younger kid was bein goaded to go to college, instead he went straight into construction and related work (demolition is so much fun at that age), and during the past month moved into his first apartment and has never been happier. The older kid finished college more or less a couple years early, and appears to be working on her MRS, because whatever she’s doing for income, it ain’t related to her degree.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3665074/posts?page=3#3
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