Elderly baby boomers - the selfish, arrogant bane of civilization. http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-05-02/news/boomtastrophe/ Boomtastrophe "Baby Boomers hoped to die before they got old. They lied. And now theyâre dragging the whole country down." By Martin Kuz Published: May 2, 2007 "...Since last year, when the oldest among them started turning 60, Boomerganda has blitzed the country. A mix of self-promotion and historical fantasy, this pro-Boomer hype recasts them as The Greater Generation, to borrow the humble title of a recent book touted as a "defense of the Baby Boom legacy." On TV and Web sites, in news articles and windy tomes, generational shills aver that the nation rode the Boomer rebellion into an enlightened age, freed at last from the tyranny of Pat Boone. But as sure as Woodstock's free love gave way to Altamont's bloodshed, the promise of Boomers succumbed long ago to egotism. Beneath the middle-class nostalgia lies an American dystopia of their making, a state of disgrace now laid bare by social critics and the online hordes. Boomers traded tree-hugging for money-grubbing and unraveled the social welfare net. Their refusal to reform Social Security and Medicare threatens to bankrupt federal coffers, while their talk of "reinventing" retirement conceals the bleak fact that almost half of them can't afford to quit working, thanks to deficient savings. Their budget woes derive, in part, from checkbook parenting, an indulgent manner of child-rearing that has yielded a cultural anomaly once thought impossible â a generation of young adults more narcissistic than Boomers. Not that Mom and Dad would utter a mea culpa for their blunders, either as parents or as members of the generation that popularized the Smothers brothers, bad credit, and wife-swapping. After all, it's the Boomer century. We just curse at it. State Senate leader Don Perata proposed a ballot initiative last month demanding removal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Explaining his rationale, the Oakland Democrat evoked the blood spilled by his generation during an earlier war of choice. "A lot of us Baby Boomers, we've been here before," he said at a press conference. "We lost our moral center in this country because of what happened in Vietnam. I'll be damned if I'm going to let that happen again." Memo to Sen. Perata: Vietnam started happening again four years ago, and this time, the Texan in Chief sending young Americans to die hails from your age bracket. Yet as Boomers voice faint concern about the widening economic divide â everything's fabulous on our side, thanks â they persist in lionizing their role in the civil rights crusade. "They don't like to admit hypocrisy," says Males, who's writing a book titled Boomergeddon, an analysis of his generation's influence on America. "They like to think, 'We are good, we are just, we do almost no wrong.'" The tendency of Boomers to claim the moral high ground as their private domain explains the popular perception that they alone agitated for civil rights. In fact, their parents and grandparents, the Silent and G.I. generations maligned by Boomers as social conformists, supplied the movement with brigades of foot soldiers and its most visible leaders â Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael, and Rosa Parks, among others. "Boomers take the credit, but the Silent Generation should get it for civil rights," says social historian and author William Strauss, an expert in generational studies. "What the Boomers were doing was starting riots." ...Boomer apathy toward the economic underclass parallels their disregard for the green movement, one more cause they deserted in favor of that other kind of green. Starting in the mid-'80s, seduced by greed's goodness, hippies "evolved" into yuppies and cashed in with most everyone else in their generation. Soon enough, Boomers were driving Ford Explorers and living in McMansions, their memories of VW vans and communes dissolving like bong residue. Boomers piously insist that conservation remains high on their to-do list. After all, they haul their recyclables to the curb each week and volunteer to clean up riverbanks every Earth Day. They saw An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore is one of theirs, don't you know). Some sat in a Prius once. Over on the "Killing Earth" side of the ledger, fully one-quarter of Boomers own a second home, and roughly half of the SUVs and RVs on the road belong to them. To this generation, conservation means buying a smaller Cessna. ...The two Boomer presidents may stand on opposite sides of their generation's undying cultural war, but their shared arrogance bridges the gorge. "Bush is a feckless Boomer who thinks he's never made a mistake," says Martin Nolan, a San Francisco author and social historian. "And Bill and Hillary had that attitude of 'Aren't you lucky to have voted for us?'" ..."Boomers have this thing where they say, "We gotta hate kids at the same time we try to behave like them,'" Males says. He points out that the crime rate among people age 25 and under has dropped in most major categories in recent years. "But Boomers just say, 'I feel like kids today are worse.' They knock down younger generations so they can feel good about themselves." Disparage your parents, demonize your kids. Greater Generation, indeed. ...More than other generations, Boomers feel compelled to inflate their legacy, a collective chest-thumping that belies their insecurity about what they wrought. They want to believe that without their daring to light up, get laid, and pass out, America would still wallow in the benighted '50s. The Age of Aquarius transformed history and transcended time ... in their own mind. But as Males says, "A lot of this celebrating of the past seems like more than nostalgia. It's like trying to turn the past into some super-morally conscious era, and using that to condemn subsequent generations." Boomers were blessed to be born into a country of bountiful prosperity, when opportunity presented low-hanging fruit. With their numbers, they couldn't help change America. Yet they have handed down a divided, divisive culture that holds far less promise than the one they inherited, selling their ideals for a summer home in the Hamptons. Not that they would utter a mea culpa. As noted Boomer and Spinal Tap frontman David St. Hubbins once observed, "I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation." For too long, Boomers have lived trapped inside their own hallucination. "
The part about SS and Medi was a load of crap. Our grandparents and parents paid almost nothing and have gotten, and are still getting much, much, much more than they ever paid in. When the system was designed back in the 30's the reason the retirement age was set at 60 was because the average life expectancy was around 60. They never actually planned on having to pay people. When I started working in the 70's, the percentage was raised to 5% or something like that, and then up and up, each tme saying they were going to save the system, to the 16% or so it is now. My parents paid like 3%, and now they get 30 to 40 years collecting. My grandparents made out even better because they were only paying 1 or 2% back in the day, and collected for 40 years from it. From 1977 to present I paid the maximum amount every year. There is no way I'll ever see it. Us boomers will never even see 1/2 of what we put in because we are the last ones into the ponzi scheme. Somebody always seems to steal the money before it gets to the end. That's how ponzi schemes work, and that's why they are illegal. Somebody will have to pay. The system always was a fraud, and still is.
SS was never designed as a "retirement" plan (i.e you "get back" what you invest). It's a contract between generations. The problem with SS is that over the years everyone lost sight of that, especially the congress. They should have been adjusting the entitlement age all along. They should not have expanded SS coverage to others the program was not designed for (i.e. Supplemental SS, disability etc...) These should have been funded separately. But, remember who holds the purse strings...Congress! And it is just to good to pass up. A big pot of money to spend, because we have ALWAYS run a surplus in SS. We have never had a deficit. I think a major reason both parties turned a blind eye to illegal immigration is because of all the money these workers pay into SS but can't collect. The only way to fix it is to: Raise entitlement age Reduce benefits Raise taxes Look some form of all 3 in the next few years, because eventually we will have a deficit in SS.
"Contract between generations" Thats just a high and mighty way to say its a FRAUD stealing from the next guy until there aren't enough next guys left to steal from! Just because it was DESIGNED AS A PONZI SCHEME doesn't make it right, or anything you'd want to perpetuate. They only say the bit about it wasn't intended to be a retirement system now after we've been paying thru the nose for 30 years into it. What a big lie it was. How are they going to pay for it once the boomers start retiring? The should just change it to a means tested "old age" pension system with a minimum payment the same as welfare, and use a sales tax or fuel tax to increase general revenues instead of specific payroll taxes to fund it. We need to learn the lesson that there is no free lunch, and the reason is because it was already eaten by previous generations and the graft in Washington.
I'm sure the leaders on both sides of the aisle will work together to educate voters about these problems and how we have to undergo pain to fix it.
Maybe giving amnesty to the next 100 million illegals and putting their earnings on the ss tax rolls is what some politicians have in mind.
Just like the last time, and the time before, and the time before that. God help us when the government "saves" us.
Shamefully this is probably true, though the stupid politicians refuse to face the reality that the minimum wage the majority of poor immigrants will make, coupled by their seven children with no health insurance and their elderlies from the motherland, won't even come close to covering the ss shortcoming, not even close.
We could even charge for Pay Per View if we were doing it to old politicians. Heck, even I'd cough up some coin to see Ted the Swimmer get toasted. I bet we could put a big dent in the national debt if Carter was going around.