Generation Wrecked

Fortune ^ | 2002-10-10 | Noshua Watson

[BureaucratusMaximus]

My generation: the boomers, have to be the most self obsessed in our history....and the worst parents.

I appreciate your honesty.

I'm a Gen-Xer too (1974). What I see that is most encouraging about my generation is that many more mothers are staying home with their children and the husband is the sole "bread winner" of the family. No matter how you look at it...it produces healthier and more functional families. (most of the latch-key kids that I knew were really screwed up).

[dfwgator]

There is no way I'll manage to save 7.5 million.

Look at it this way, do you really need the same lifestyle in your later years as you did when you were younger? I think the stuff about having to have a lot of money saved up to keep up the current lifestyle is a bunch of BS. When I'm old, just give me a small comfortable house with a TV, and I'm all set.

[Richard Kimball]

The only sector of the economy where there's been huge inflation in recent years is in education costs.

Medical too.

And what do these two things have in common?

DINGDINGDING!!!!

We have a winner! Yes, they are the two economic sectors that Congress has dumped the most MONEY into!!!!

BTW, the original purpose of college (as started in Europe) was NOT to teach people how to make money. That's what apprenticeships, etc, were for. The original purpose of college was to teach people who were already rich how to act like the upper class was expected to act. In other words, college wasn't originally supposed to teach you how to make money, it was supposed to teach you how to spend money.

People with college degrees generally do earn more money than people without, but the law of supply and demand is taking over, and the more people there are with college degrees, the less valuable those degrees become. Unfortunately, the other issue affecting earning ability is government interference. Most businesses probably spend more complying with unfunded mandates than they do on taxes. You didn't used to have to be rich to own and run a gas station or a fast food restaurant. In California, with the recently passed six weeks paid leave every year law, what's going to happen to entry level jobs? The cost of a $10 per hour person to the business will go to nearly $18 per hour, including SS, sick leave, vacation, family leave, and insurance. How many businesses need someone who is gone for two and a half months every year, and how many of these people who are using the family leave can add $18 per hour of value to a business?

[skeeter]

Actually it's more the baby-boomers than X'ers with the SUVs and ME ME ME mentality. I see the boomer across the street who just bought his 18 year old son a brand new jeep Liberty 2002. Gimme a break.

I won't deny that the boomers have the me, me mentality, but their kids have it in spades. Xer's I know a few years back were spending like there was no tomorrow because 'the business cycle had been defeated' & it was all blue sky from now on. Many of them were dumfounded when brokers made the first of a series of margin calls back in '99.

And of course, it will be the boomers who suck up all the available Medicare money and Social Security funds.

Boomers are the last people you should be complaining about re: SS. They were born into the system and have been contributing to it their whole lives. You're better off blaming those who benefit from it but who have not contributed. Believe me there are tens of thousands of those.

[lodwick]

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[weikel]

They didn't Willie is just a whinie baby boomer( well at least he is against the social security ponzi scheme). Libertarian attitudes( among them that the world isn't going to take care of you and you have to look after yourself) and thrift are good things btw the rich generally get that way by being fanatical about saving money :).

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away.

Really? Let's see:

-Out of college at age 22, can't get a job in your field (accounting), so you work a telemarketing job for 6 months ($6.25 an hour), then a warehouse job for 3 months ($7.00 an hour), then do a 5 month stint as a waiter (around $300 a week). Money saved: $0, and this is living with a roommate and driving a 12 year old car.

-Student Loans start coming due at 23, lucky you get a job as a clerk in an insurance company ($9.50 an hour), and can start saving money. After taxes, FICA and insurance, you take home just under $1200 a month, after 5 years on the job you have have scrimped and saved $12,000.

-You are now 28, and you get a job at H&R Block giving you a starting salary of $32,000 a year. You now have to save and invest another $88,000 in 4 years on this salary to make the "idealized" amount that you should have stashed away. Right.

Not every "Gen-Xer" was a software tycoon, or a dotcom businessman, most followed the path I described above. Karen seems to be a bit low in funds, but I know a lot of 50 year olds who are in the same boat as her. My advise to her: start putting away an extra $20 a week into your 401(k). At 7% annually, you will gain an extra $90,000 in your retirement fund in 28 years. That could make the difference between "surviving" and "living" in retirement.

[ThinkDifferent]

A resounding no...college(nowadays) is a joke. On the job experience/learning by trial and error/learning on your own has been what has helped me succeed in my career, not the $30,000 piece of paper.

Absolutely. I had to get the piece of paper to get a job, but the "education" I received is nowhere near as valuable in my field (software development) as real world experience. Maybe 5 of the courses I took were both useful and things I didn't already know.

[general_re]

I'll pay it off eventually, I reckon, if the cigarettes don't kill me off first...

I'm thinking about switching to unfiltered Camels for just that reason ;)

[KC_Conspirator]

Sounds like I agree with alot of what Copeland says. I too think the Baby Boomers are the "worst generation" to come about in a long time and they will rob this country blind before they are gone. Not only that, the leftists who dominate the pop culture of that generation are the most divisive since the Civil War. Like post Civil War, its going to take them dying off and new immigrants to come to this country to erase their memories.

[Nick Danger]

I find this to be more Gen X griping.

Really? I thought it was just some leftist at Fortune magazine trying to sell class warfare, business-bashing, and more government.

I don't know about you, but when I read something like this...

Social Security will start to evaporate as he turns 50--or before, if the lockbox gets raided

...I reach for the crap detector. Use of the term "lockbox" immediately tells me that the author does not understand how the Social Security program operates, but does want to peddle liberal canards. So even though I'm going to see what looks like some sort of dispassionate economic analysis, I'll need the crap detector on with the "liberal canard" knob turned all the way up.

Before I run into another canard though, I trip over plain old stupidity:

Almost 60% of Gen Xers have some college education, and 6.6% have graduate school degrees. The Census Bureau calls their pursuit of higher education the "Big Payoff," since historically a college-educated full-time worker earns 1.8 times more over his lifetime than a high school graduate.

The idea that wages and income are distributed on a bell curve ought to be intuitive. It makes some sense that in the past, those with college degrees gravitated toward the higher end of the curve, but what we were really looking at was some kind of productivity+luck+family-connections matrix that caused some people to make a lot more money than most.

The idea that we could look at a correlation between these people and college degrees, and then produce a subsequent generation of all rich people by putting 60% of them through college, could only come from some stupid social engineer who didn't really understand the phenomenon. Anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen that when 60% of the population is college educated, the value of the degree will be diminished and the degree will no longer be a ticket to riches. Anyone who foresaw a society of 60% chiefs and 40% indians is an idiot, and will probably end up writing for Fortune magazine.

Uh-oh, there goes the crap detector.

Instead of creating catch phrases, the government should focus on creating retirement options that...

Does everyone look to government to create their retirement options, or is that just an artifact of having liberals writing Mommy State advocacy in magazines? If the government needs to get involved, it's because the government hosed things up in the first place by taxing people so heavily. You'll notice that 90% of these "retirement" vehicles coming out of government involve getting the income past the tax man so that it can be saved at all. If the taxes weren't so ridiculously high to begin with, we wouldn't need all these IRAs, 401-K's, and so on. The whole thing is about liberals trying to control your life: first they set taxes so high that they are nearly confiscatory, then they tell you what behaviors you can engage in -- that they approve of -- through which you can evade their high taxes. As long as you do what they say, they won't take all your money. What they'll do instead is write articles in Fortune magazine telling you that what you need is more of this stuff... for your own good.

[weikel]

Social security should be abolished along with the income tax and federal reserve( more important then you probably realize) and all entitlements for able bodied adults period. The income tax should be replaced with a NRST supplemented with a lottery.

[weikel]

If you get lung cancer ca ching( if you are into screwing tobacco companies with shysters im not).

[weikel]

Flavored rice is spendthrift food best stick to storebrand mac & cheese.

[CDHart]

I heard part of a program on Fox News earlier in the week, and someone from Harvard said that shortly it will be an older employees' market in technical fields, because the younger people all have MBAs, etc., and the only ones who know how to fix things are the older blue-collar workers and immigrants. My husband was overjoyed, as he is a 57-year-old toolmaker, and thinks he's a dinosaur!

Carolyn

[weikel]

The worst parents unfortunately goes to the WWII generation. They raised the boomers.

[weikel]

I agree a woman's place is in the home the boomer plague of career women is unnatural and unhealthy.

[AngryJawa]

I agree with all those goals. The trick is in defeating the leftist demogogues who will undoubtedly wail about evil conservatives forcing Granny to eat cat food. Unfortunately, the nanny state has bred logical thought out of the masses. Short of some unknown super-charismatic politician stepping forward with these goals, I have a hard time seeing the inertia of big government ending. Something awful, truly awful, will have to happen in order to force change. God help us all.

Great, I bummed myself out again...

[GenXFreedomFighter]

Bumped and bookmarked for later.

[Willie Green]

The worst parents unfortunately goes to the WWII generation. They raised the boomers.

Gen-X was raised by pot-smoking '60s hippies.