Because they miscalculated. They thought they could kick the can down further away and instead the fuse was a bit too short and it blew up in thier face. They were hoping to postpone it all to their great great grandchildren. But it blew up in their face now. Karma is a bitch, it blew up right at the cusps of BB retirement.
Where do you get your info? If BB started putting aside a little each month after they got their kids out of diapers and finally made a little more than they spent and maxed out their IRA and 401K and started laying off the stocks when they hit age 50, and didn't refinance the house using it like a bank, they are doing just fine. You didn't have to be smart, you just had to avoid being stupid. And nothing has changed, it was the same for WWII, BB, and now genX and genY. The only thing that has changed maybe is genY doesn't have the cost of diapers to deal with. And I can guarantee you, no matter how much you borrow to buy that fancy new car or that exotic vacation it will still be cheaper than kids. So WWII spent their money on BB and BB spent their money on genX and genX spends their money on consumerables, in the end all you need to do is spend a little less than you make and invest the difference, and everything turns out fine. But getting back to being young today, it's the college loans that are the problem. But hey, just another bad investment that many young people made. Better to make them when you are young.
the lost generation need sto pay the price for espousing the bs they received from their liberal teachers. the good things in life come as a result of the sweat of the brow not out of thin air. the plumbing in your house is the result of hard work and is not the product a feely good liberal arts education.
Just wait about 5-10 years and see how they feel, if you aren't outsourced or downsized first. If you are still in the field by then, you will likely have maxed out your income potential, be ordered around by some MBA-type idiot that has no concept of how to design or implement anything, and have lost the ability to express any creativity on the job. Most of your well-qualified colleagues will have moved on to something with better long term potential, and you will be left spending time with the remaining mediocre hordes of foreigners. And make sure you start learning some other languages, because you will soon experience half or more of your work colleagues having meetings in Mandarin Chinese or Indian dialects and your biggest challenge will be basic communications not any significant project achievement. God help you if your boss is one of those types too. So, enjoy your job now and save a lot of money because you will be needing a career change within 5-10 years unless you somehow manage to join up with some colleagues and get in a start-up situation somewhere. Don't expect a lot of bright, enthusiastic engineers to come in from the new younger generation either - most of their parents in those fields have already warned them that it is a dead end road and they are going to do other things.
You have a point... I suppose post-WW2 Germans and Italians couldn't blame the previous generation for having to rebuild their whole country while suffering food shortages. My point exactly... Baby Boomers are the immediate gratification generation. The only problem now is that they are going to use their voting block to suck everyone else dry. They should have thought about the future when they were refinancing their house so they could buy that BMW and the stainless Viking Range and Subzero fridge. Yeah, it sucks to wake up and realize you caught herpes, but maybe your generation should have thought about that before they joined Plato's Retreat for some anonymous wife swapping sex.
The good things in life come and go. Sometimes there is a lot of work involved. Sometimes it is just luck. Sometimes things go so bad it's hard to believe there is a God. Sometimes it goes so good it's hard to beleive there is not a God. If workiing hard makes you happy then enjoy it. But don't assume people who don't work hard deserve pain and suffering. Sounds like you enjoy pain and suffering. You like it when you endure it to get something, and you enjoy it when others receive it for not working hard.
Well, the tiny startup I work at has no MBAs, only engineers and physicists. And I'm only the 4th employee there, after the two founders and a PhD they hired last year. So if we grow I don't think I'll have too many people ordering me around besides the founders. Of course, there's also always the chance of failure this early in a startup R&D company, but it's good experience for now even if that happens. Got that covered, already know 3 languages. English, Russian, French. All have already come in useful during my education and internships. Yep... enjoying the job and saving money is always good advice. That's why I'm dabbling a bit with trading & investing, see if I can learn enough about it to keep the savings growing at a reasonable rate. We had 5 enthusiastic inters this summer. And there's plenty more where that came from. We have a partnership with a lab at a university that cranks out physics and engineering grad students... All you doom and gloom guys are way off base. Ultimate underlying driver of economic growth is technological progress, and that's continuing on and accelerating faster than ever.
"It's better to burn out than to fade away" You're obviously intelligent, but fuck you and your pity party anyway. There is no saving this country. Bring it on, harder faster. Vote for Obama again. Cheer for every single entitlement you see. Anything else is just prolonging the agony and delaying the inevitable. Light it on fire and walk away.