My birth year of 1960 has often been the hinge for fairly nasty (from my perspective) changes in public policy. It was those born in 1960 who were the first to be required to register with Selective Service under Jimmy Carter, after the post-Vietnam hiatus. And we were the first to face delaying of retirement age for Social Security benefits.
From my vantage point the 1945-1959 boomer got the breaks and my tail-end boomers got the screws.
Not true. Us pre-boomers were required to register, WWII and all that, you know.
Agreed 1962 here
See? I look at the boomers as an advantage to us X'ers, aka baby-busters. I'm anticipating that the boomers will work the kinks out (as much as technologically and culturally possible) of aging in America. So a comfortable infrastructure will be in place by the time we GenXers get there, one that suddenly finds itself with an abundance of resources to demand ratio, given the relative size of the boomer and X generations.
Its a theory. I admit to being optimistic.
My birth year of 1960 has often been the hinge for fairly nasty (from my perspective) changes in public policy. It was those born in 1960 who were the first to be required to register with Selective Service under Jimmy Carter, after the post-Vietnam hiatus. And we were the first to face delaying of retirement age for Social Security benefits.
From my vantage point the 1945-1959 boomer got the breaks and my tail-end boomers got the screws.
I think there's no question about that. Preboomers like me retired and got grandfathered in on Social Security; the chickens will come home to roost in the next decade as the current-accounts cash flow of Social Security goes from positive (throughout history) to negative (in about 20018) to horrendous.People claim that the Social Security Trust Fund will remain solvent until 2045 or so. But don't count on the SSTF to help you pay my Social Security; it won't help. Any more than simply cranking up the presses and printing more dollars to hand out would help, or did help during the Carter Stagflation.
The SSTF is useless because it is nothing more than IOUs the government has written to itself to document how much money it has taken from us under the pretense that it was invested for our retirement. And blown, with nothing to show for it. When the Social Security cash flow goes negative, and they try to tap the SSTF, who is going to cash that Treasury bond? You are, via your taxes to the Treasury - precisely as if there were no SSTF in the first place. The SSTF is "Enron Accounting", nothing more.