Baby Boom bust II

When you write as one of the many bloggers few people read, you are encouraged when a national writer addresses the same topic you've already taken up, confirming your instincts about what's happening in the world around you.

Take Michael Kinsley, for instance, writing in The Atlantic magazine about the bust of the Baby Boom.

Look down this page, and you'll see that in my last piece, written over Labor Day weekend, I took a slightly different and much shorter tact than Kinsley.

We both generally conclude that until now Baby Boomers, that great generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964, have blown it.

Kinsley suggests in his article that our generation has 19 years to save its reputation, by allowing ourselves to be taxed to the point that we pay back all the money we and our parents borrowed to finance the society we have enjoyed over the past half century in America.

My suggestion was there was no way to make repairs.

But Kinsley has a point, and people who read me know I am all for making amends for our sins while we can.

Check out Michael Kinsley's piece. It's politically impossible, but at least he offers a solution.

Baby Boom a bust

I come here on Labor Day Weekend 2010 to declare the Baby Boom generation a failure.

I'm part of the failure. In fact, all my life I liked to tell people I was born at the cusp of the wave of the boomers. Born in 1947, the official second year of the boom, I have turned 63 and am still trying to make a success of myself.

Reading the business section of the Denver Post today, pushed me to the conclusion that I am not alone. All my fellow baby boomers have, as Peter Fonda said in "Easy Rider," blown it.

Here's a little inventory of the stories and comment you'll find in the Post that back me up.

"Unions facing tough times," by Steve Raabe tells the story of a decades-long decline in union membership in Colorado and nationally, which coincides with the devastation of the nation's middle class in America.

Most of us baby boomers came from the loins of the blue-collar generation that organized America after World War II, although even that great generation never reached more than a 34 percent share of the workforce as union members.

That means, too, we baby boomers were young witnesses to the worst of union abuses: Jimmy Hoffa, wages paid for work not done, false claims of on-the-job-injuries, and a cycle of wage increases that made the work not worth the price.

So most of us chose the white-collar way, and found ourselves going to work, and teaching our children to go to work, in what is now parodied on TV as "The Office." The idiots are real; the trouble is they are us.

All the while the old wealthy and the new wealthy, the very establishment we rebelled against as hippies, made sure that,along with unions, the entire middle class in America was drained of power and influence, reduced to a status just above poverty line.

But let me continue my inventory.

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, offers a piece in favor of a second round of stimulus measures for the economy, arguing that the unemployed and underemployed in America will never get back to work without one.

It's hard for me to even mention the idiocy of the article paired with Weisbrot's, by William F. Shughart II, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland,Calif., who argues against a second stimulus package because: "The only sure way to perk up the job market is to cut taxes permanently and rein in public spending and excessive regulation."

Which, by the way, is also the establishment's sure formula to push what's left of the lower middle class below that poverty line, and to ensure future opportunities for the wealthy to become more and more -- even exceedingly -- rich.

But then there is the column by Robert J. Samuelson that provides the real indictment of an entire generation.

Samuelson gets to the failure of baby boomers to provide their children and their children's children a proper education, which was the real route baby boomers took to whatever prosperity they have gained.

Samuelson catalogs the failure of parents and education reformers in America to improve learning for large swaths of U.S. students over the years. "Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well."

That's where we blew it. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and make repairs.

Bring it on! Make retirement age 70, now!

"For our children and our childrens' children."

You hear that invocation from every politician who opens his or her mouth nowadays: about government spending (whether to add or subtract to it); deficit spending (no one wants to add to it); Social Security; Medicare and Medicaid; and government services in general, from national-parks admissions and upkeep, to food stamps.
(Ilustration: commons.wikipedia.org)

I've always thought the invocation somewhat hypocritical, primarily because I myself don't anticipate meeting my children's children, and I certainly don't think I'll be around to see how any of them will handle the big national debt we baby boomers are going to hand them upon our deaths.

I have always thought many politicians -- from the many, many establishment Republicans who mouth the invocation, to such Democrats as Bill Ritter and even Andrew Romanoff -- were more than a little hypocritical when they use the phrase to further their own political interests. Most of them, too, know they aren't going to be around when the debt finally gets paid.

And then this morning, in the Denver Post, I saw a front-page story headlined: "A shift toward payout at 70," a McClatchy Newspapers story about a bipartisan movement among senior members of Congress to move receipt of the primary Social Security benefit up to age 70. I immediately started calculating what that might mean for me since I am now 63, and have already filed for the 63-year-old primary benefit.

But then I began reading deeper into the story. It said those old-fogey congressmen and women had no intention of boosting the filing status of people my age or theirs, but planned to start enforcing the age-hike fifteen years from now when most of them, too, will be dead.

That would, however, put my children and my childrens' children right smack in the middle of the people who would have to work longer and harder before they died to get a Social Security benefit at all.

I thought: What hypocrisy! The height of cynicism! I was outraged, and even before church! The bastards simply have no conscience.

Then, of course, I read further and absorbed some reasonable arguments for setting the full-benefit age at 70, yet none that really overcame the hurdle in my mind that the change should come immediately -- baby boomers be damned! -- out of a sense of fairness to those future generations.

After all, I had already been calculating how I would survive financially if the age were moved and I did live that long.

It would be retribution, I thought, for my having thought so little of future generations during my lifetime. And, for that matter, a just retribution for all baby boomers who cannot, as a generation, claim they have been thinking much about their children and their childrens' children -- until now.

So I say to Obama: Change now! Make good on your promise to change Washington and tell the old geezers to flip the switch on 70 now!

That's the real way to save Social Security and bring the nation more quickly out of debt. I'm willing. Give it a shot! Our children and our childrens' childrens' futures are at stake!