Just as a little background, I was born in 1957, so I fit right into the dates on the social security card pictured here, as do my siblings and their spouses, and people I knew from high school and college. As a general rule, we went to school, got jobs, bought houses, raised kids and gave them every chance to succeed. We have more stuff and more opportunities than our parents had, but they had more stuff and more opportunities than their parents had too, and our kids will have more than we ever did.
The quote from Paul Begala is from a column he wrote titled "The Worst Generation." I read the column; I wondered if there was some measurement behind the prevailing caricature of baby boomers, and if his column is any indication, no there is not. Instead, he generalizes and picks out historical events that he blames on boomers, which is sort of what I intended to do in reverse, so now I feel a little bit validated in my approach.
When I turned 18 in 1975, the economy was in a kind of malaise, with high inflation and occasional gas shortages caused by OPEC, and American companies were beginning to show their weakness versus foreign companies, especially the Japanese. My generation did not cause these problems, but we were in the workforce when the economy turned around in the 1980s. Baby boomers, mostly a little older than myself were at the forefront of the high-tech companies that drove the strong economy during the 1980s and 1990s. We made our contribution.
It has also been largely during my adulthood that we have made substantial progress toward equality on many levels. A generation before us, racism was still standard practice across the country (I know, it has not completely gone away), women were barely represented in the workforce, gays were treated like criminals. Tolerance is still a work in progress, but baby boomers have made huge strides toward equal treatment on many fronts.
For a generation that is supposedly so selfish, our generation has given plenty to the previous generation and to the next one. People my age have taken care of their parents when they got sick, just like generations before, not to mention all the taxes we paid supporting their Social Security and Medicare. As for our kids, we have lavished more attention and money on them than our parents could have ever afforded. We used to do sports a couple of days a week when I was a kid. Our kids go to sports camp, have to buy uniforms, do fundraisers for their sports. We get them involved in music and community service and AP classes so that their college resumes are overfilled with impressive accomplishments. If anything, they may suffer from too much parental input and too much spending on their behalf, but we have not exactly neglected them in favor of ourselves.
And as we approach retirement, we keep hearing that we are the selfish generation that is going to bankrupt the country, because we want the government to take care of us in our old age, and we won't agree to reductions in Social Security to help balance the books. Hmm, let's think about that. So first, who could have guessed that all of these tens of millions of people would be retiring and taking money from the government at the same time? I wonder, who could have known? The answer, of course, is that pretty much everyone everywhere realized for the last 60 years that a huge wave of retirees was coming.
The logical -- or more importantly, the responsible -- approach would have been to build up a surplus in the Social Security system, then let that surplus drain down as the baby boomers used it. And sure enough, Social Security has a big surplus, and it really is not going broke at all, and it can easily be made solvent for another fifty years with some small changes. The problem is not the Social Security system. The problem is that while all of that surplus was building up in Social Security, the rest of the government was borrowing it to pay for all of our deficits. Now, it has to be paid back, and it's a big crisis because the United States has been borrowing my retirement contributions for 40 years, and now they don't have the money to pay for my retirement. The fact is, the government has been living off the taxes the boomers have paid during their working years, and now that baby boomers are retiring, politicians are trying to find a way out of the bargain we agreed to all of this time.
I have some other suggestions for ways to balance the budget, but I will save those for another day. But at least realize that baby boomers are not exactly asking to retire in luxury and spend the next 30 years sailing our yachts around the world. I have read that people retiring now are the first group ever who will get less back out of Social Security than they put in, hardly what you would expect from a self-absorbed, self-indulgent group of people. We are also the first generation to get screwed by private industry by replacing pensions with 401K's, which saved companies money and reduced their risks but have not turned out to be sufficient for most retirees (although to be fair I think only about one generation ever got widespread pensions.) No, we are not retiring rich (certain people I know notwithstanding.) Instead, I read all the time that people my age should just plan to keep working into their 80s (selfishly taking jobs that young people really need), and then die quickly and preferably cheaply. Or something close to that. We have no expectations of being pampered in our elder years.
I suspect that some clever person twenty years ago or so realized that baby boomers were going to hit Social Security age one day and decided to start a campaign to disparage them so that they could be screwed out of as many retirement benefits as possible. I don't think there is really anything to it other than anecdotes and cherry-picked stories. Boomers I know have plenty to be proud of.
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