THE WAR AGAINST YOUTH

OUCH!!!!

Boomers ain’t gonna like this one.

Hat tip to my Millenial friend Harry Jarin for sending me the link.

 

The War Against Youth

The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.

By Stephen Marche

 

James Victoire

Published in the April 2012 issue

Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.

Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you’re a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here’s Rubio: “Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.” He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation.” The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.

The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama’s 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don’t exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.”

The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.

Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government’s future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.

This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers’ spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the “compassion” in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.


HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A GENERATION:

Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the young through “voting reform.” The trick is simple: Require government-issue photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don’t have current photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this “reform” into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas. Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won’t be able to vote. The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Let’s say you just graduated from high school.

College, right? You have to go to college. That’s not just what your career counselor told you. That’s in the numbers. If you go to college, you’re significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else’s pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?

And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That’s no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.

Once you’re out of college, you’ll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we’ve forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.

Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren’t internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an “important recruiting tool.” Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students “credit” for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.

But maybe you’re an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master’s or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it’s not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That’s not just an expression.

And if you didn’t take your high school advisor’s advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what’s left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a “globally competitive wage.” Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders “won’t be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing.”

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children’s birthright for a mess of their own pottage.

 


 

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ELSE:

 

A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, “those who earn less than a thousand euros”; the NEETs of England, “not in employment, education, or training”; the hittistes of Tunisia, “those who lean against the wall.” Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.

 

Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They’re entitled, they have too many choices. They don’t know what they want. They’re getting themselves into debt. They don’t know how good they have it.

These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.

The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought “being able to give their children better opportunities” was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.

Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it’s exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.

Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.

A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it’s the irresponsible, feckless children who don’t have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.

People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It’s the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody’s parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don’t have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.

The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?

Get ready for the summer. It’s going to be hot.

Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.

The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don’t want to be there, who would rather be working?

Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what’s happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.

By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we’ll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

We’ll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.


Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.



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Stucky

Oh, goody. A 5,571 word hatchet job. I scanned it. Y-A-W-N. Seems to be some duplication. Remember that song, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover?” Step off the bus, Gus. This author’s article should be titled, “50 Ways To Say The Same Shit Over and Over.”

Yeah, I know. I’m in denial. I’m this, I’m that. Whatever.

What do Millenials and Obama have in common? Both blame the previous Administration for ……. everything. What good does it do? Absolutely nuthin. Huh!

Hey, I have millenial kids. I love ’em. Here’s a thought. Quit bitching!! At the end of the day you’ve got nothing to show for it except a sore throat. Go out and do something. Like protest the fuckin’ endless wars like your Boomer parents did. Oh, wait. You’re on your iPhone? Your iPad? Your iSuck app? Well, nevermind, then.

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stan
stan
Stucky

Yeah, but I can read faster than Evelyn Wood.
I grasp concepts faster than the average bear.
I know what the author will say before the author says it.
My mind is sharper than Albert Einstein’s.
I am the only person Chuck Norris fears.
And, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Sooo … what’s your point?

Colma Rising
Colma Rising

It IS a war against youth. Everything people worry about is being heaped on the backs of a generation whilst the means to adequately service these fears are being stripped away in the name of utopian ideologies from all political spectrums.

What a great legacy, boomers.

BBES

AWD

When the collapse happens, and boomers aren’t getting their SS ponzi payments anymore, they’ll be begging youngsters for a can of dog food (or a case). Boomers are going to get instant Karma someday, just not today.

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Stucky

AWD

I have just two questions.

1) Why do you keep posting GIGANTIC pics?

2) see pic below

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Stan
Stan

The baby boomers are the cause of all our problems

TeresaE
TeresaE

Sorry, the boomers g*damn well knew what they were doing.

My ex father-in-law said of a union contract signed back in the late ’80s, “we’re screwing our kids to keep what we got, oh well, whatca gonna do?” THEY knew.

The politicians and their BUILDINGS full of accounting geeks damn well knew the truth.

The union leaders, whom are still getting full dues on half-benefit jobs, sure as hell know too.

Yep, the kids will be screwed,

But us X’ers are going to be hit really, really, hard first. When we enter our senior years, I doubt there is anything left for us except the generosity of our children.

Whom, thankfully, should still have decades left to work before they become so old they can’t.

If us X’ers and Millennials would band together we could fix a lot of the this mess. Instead we have divided into two groups: those as lucky as the boomers and those as fucked as the kids.

Today the sun shines, so ponzi on.

The Central Scrutinizer
The Central Scrutinizer

I believe this will now be below the banner so the sniveling boomer can see it all.

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The Central Scrutinizer
The Central Scrutinizer

This AWD is correct.

Dragline
Dragline

This kind of goes with the “Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” article. The youngest MIllennials will get the vote in about 2018, but most of them by 2014 or 2016.

Right now their votes are essentially up for grabs. Obama and the Democrats have squandered his early advantage by only paying lip service to their concerns. Yet the Republicans have not stepped up either and still seem to think that cultural wars circa 1994 are viable among the young.

Whomever figures this out is going to be ruling the country. This is where your sudden mood shift is going to come from.

Sniveling Boomer
Sniveling Boomer

Are you sure that picture was worth it?

Hey, I’m new here. What turns me on are pictures of old Boomer fat people. I mean, really really fat old fuckers with their old fucking fat bulging out all over the fucking place looking all gross and nasty. Would you happen to have any of those?

Thank You.

ASIG
ASIG

So the writer says when it comes to the young —“Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do.” And then turns right around and starts blasting Boomers again.

Cynical30
Cynical30

Case in point: I was on a work call with an investor who saw an ad for a property that I was working on. He was a gruff abrasive guy, and speaking to him actually reminded me of talking to my dad. We got off on tangents of talking about Ben Bernanke and monetary policy while we were discussing his investment strategies. He started out in life working as a fireman in Detroit, then as a roofer, then as an owner of a roofing company, then ended up as a real estate investor on top of that. He told me how he worked really hard and with no college degree he carved out a good living for himself and his family, paid his son’s way through medical school, and was looking to retire on real estate income… as well as have some assets to pass on to his son.

He then proceeded to pepper me with questions on the asset. Now so you guys know, I am not a broker, and I don’t sell real estate per se. What I do is I break down the aspects of all of the deals that I work on and come up with investment strategies and tell potential investors about them. If they want to pursue the asset then more power to them and I can point them in the right direction. If they have a BETTER plan then I invite them to share so I can learn.

So the guy says, “You seem like a pretty smart kid. You did some pretty thorough analysis of this property. So tell me, if it’s such a good deal, what is stopping YOU from buying it? You don’t want to work for someone else forever?”

Me, “Capital. I don’t have the money to buy it.”

Him, “So why not go get financing? That’s what I did when I was starting out. I got interest only loans, then tripled down on the principal so I could own ASAP.”

Me, “Those times are over my friend. I’m assuming that you went to a community bank with a banker who probably knew you and your family. He looked at you and saw an upstanding member of the community and took a chance with you. This is virtually impossible for anyone in my generation who does not have a vast trust fund set up by mommy and daddy.”

Him, “That’s a real shame.”

Me, “Who are you telling? I worked for a lender before I came here. It was a life company. They lend on the quality of the real estate vs. the personal guarantee like your old bank did. A person like me however can’t go to them, because as a lender who keeps the loan on the balance sheet, they only look for large, Class A assets that would be way out of my price range. The next option, community banks, AREN’T community anymore. Now they are Wachovias, BofA’s, Chase, Citi whatever, and they have no interest in lending to me or small businesses in general. Hell, they are trying to shrink their exposure to commercial and residential real estate because they are all insolvent and bankrupt as is. The last option, CMBS, was a derivative of the free money NINJA game which destroyed the world economy. So, no ticky no washy.”

Him, “Take my word for it. You don’t want to be stuck working for someone else all your life.”

Me, “Do tell.”

I’m lucky I suppose. I have a ton of student loan debt but I got into the job market right before the doors slammed shut. Still, the whole American dream of working hard to run your own business and actually contribute to society while you get wealthy is pretty much dead unless you are extremely lucky or already have the resources passed on from a previous generation. I’m still trying to figure a way out of the matrix….

Stucky

Great story, Cynical. I loved it.

I truly wish I had a mentor, teacher, sponsor, etc. who could have given me that advice; “You don’t want to be stuck working for someone else all your life.” But, I didn’t. In fact I had the opposite. Working for a big stable company, for the rest of your life, that’s the advice I got. Oh well …

Would you mind sharing how old you are? You seem wise beyond your years.

Cynical30
Cynical30

I just turned 35 on Friday my man.

Stucky

Thanks. Happy Birthday!!

35? I hate you.

j/k

llpoh
llpoh

C30 – get rid of the thumb ring and maybe they will give you a loan. 😉

Also, nice job on the NCAA picks. Not. You and Smokey are neck and neck for lowest scores ever.

llpoh
llpoh

Teresa – sorry to disagree with you (rarely happens) – but Boomers on the whole are as clueless as the rest of society – and for the most part had no fucking idea what they were doing. Half the population have IQs less than 100 – so do not expect a lot of forethought out of that bunch. Of the other half, intelligent for the most part doesn’t mean smart.

Cynical30
Cynical30

Hey I looked like a genius picking Lehigh over the Dookies. Apparently I blew my wad a bit early….

ssgconway

When I asked a state legislator about state civil service benefit cuts, he told me that he favored a tiered approach: New employees get 2% of salary in a 401(k) and no medical ins. in retirement. Employees hired since 1997 get to keep their 4% 401(k) and medical in retirement, while older workers (Boomers, mainly) get to keep their defined-benefit plans and medical retirement. This creates a three-caste system, and age will be correlated with what level of benefits one receives. I told him that I favored a system of shared sacrifice, where all pony up as equally as possible, whether the folks in question are private-sector or public-sector 9and the latter should set the example). He disagreed. (He’s normally very solid and practical, too.) His take: Older workers lack the time to adjust to austerity. My take: they should have planned their lives better.
My USAF son faces this, too, as the military keeps floating trial balloons about doing away with their traditional retirement system in favor of a 401(k)-type system. (They had just rolled out the ‘Thrift Savings Plan,’ run by Barclays, when I was getting out in 2007; I always suspected that they would evolve that away from being ‘optional’ to being mandatory. I may have been prophetic in thinking that.)
Moral of both stories: The Boomers are still acting less like a ‘Prophet’ generation and more like one concerned with their own ‘profits,’ and the country’s future be damned.

Colma Rising
Colma Rising

Cynical:

Max Brooks, when speaking at some nerd convention was asked: “What would you do if zombies attacked RIGHT NOW?”

He answered (something like): “Well I would ask that everybody not panic and calmly exit through those doors right there (pointing to the exits)….

And then I would leave through this door here (points backstage).”

I never knew it, but NOT taking the advice of not only my parents but pretty respectable business persons was the BEST thing that ever happened to me…. Shit like this, Mid-nineties til ’06:

-Real estate always goes up. Buy now, draw equity to buy another to rent out, do the same….

-Quit working your shit job and go to school full time so you get better financial aid, loans, grants etc. which primarily cater to the “needy”.

-Relationships take work (that’s great coming from folks who combined for more “step” parents/siblings than I could count on both hands).

-Invest in stocks.

-Start a company and have the day laborers do the work.

-Live for today.

I could go on… yet I look around and now people are “advising” me to do the opposite, for the most part. Another funny thing is that some folks actually want to know what I’m doing now with my savings…

Either way, that “other door” looks better and better all the time.

(Happy birthday, geezer)

Dragline
Dragline

C30 — first thing I would suggest you do is go read “The Richest Man in Babylon”. Written in 1926 and still some of the best advice you can get.

Then, unless you have a line on that super-high paying job or inheritance, which I assume you don’t, you need to start looking at radical frugality. The only way most people are going to have any shot at becoming financially independent these days is going to be to give up all the shit they think they need, but don’t. Start here for some ideas: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/06/meet-mr-money-mustache/

This guy is about your age and does not need to work — mostly because he and his family do not spend money the way the average idiot does. People who can make hard choices can still find their freedom. People who want to party like a Boomer in 1985 are going to be debt slaves for the rest of their lives.

Basically, consumerism is dead. Frugality is the new social mood, but its almost a lost art. The survivors are finding it again.

If you are game to go even more radical check out “Early Retirement Extreme”.

“‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” — J. Wales

DaveL
DaveL

I don’t know who created all this mess(well, maybe everyone), but the title suggests it has been a war on youth. Yet I can’t turn on most MSM stations and not hear about how the Romney/Ryan budget(not the whole solution) will cause the demise of everything from Medicare to production of toilet paper, without even coming close to addressing the fact that this entire way of life has been an illusion and is doomed by too fucking much government spending.

How the fuck can anybody vote for an asshole (name a democrat or republican) who tells them we can spend a lot more money than we take in? Are there that many stupid people out there? We don’t need I.D’s for voting, we need IQ’s.

Zarathustra

Generational conflict is just another form of collectivism. Fuck it.

ragman
ragman

I stopped reading this bullshit when I got to “Obama’s intentions may be good”.

BiggyTmofo
BiggyTmofo

TeresaE is correct. The three tier contracts have been around for over thirty years. They may have known what was in the contract and the union guys didn’t know. Money now was how it was negotiated. The old guy retire and are replaced by cheaper wage guys. See GE plant in Louisville and GM plants. The starting wage and benefits are less than half of the old one. If your company goes bankrupt and if you are not in the UAW then piss on you and adios retirement medical. Ask the USW guys what happened when LTV went bankrupt in 2001. BTW they had over 20 job classifications, now with Mittal the number is much less.
Anyhow most boomers are going into their fifties and later broke. Their kids who work may have to support them by sharing expenses. Funny because not so long ago your fifities were your peak earning years to pad IRAs, pay off house, pay weddings and go on cool trips. Not anymore especially for the less fortunate folks. Now this is spreading to the professional people who thought they would be immune but if a company can hire for less they will. It’s bullshit but they can do it without any hassle, see back to three tier union contracts. Only an idiot would every sign non recourse student loans in this economy especially. I am glad that law schools are going down the drain and hopefully soon b-schools will to next to follow. I don’t have the answers but think hard and be smart about debt and health.

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