| 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.
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