Younger Gen: This will make you mad!!!!

Contrary to your belief, Social Security is doing fairly well considering it taps into somewhere around 12.5% of the USA payroll. Projections show it consumes around 4% of GDP with an uptick as the boomers retire in masses and then declining to under 4% as the boomers pass on.

Medicare/medicaid is an entirely different matter with their cost based on GDP doubling or more over the next few decades.

There was a major overhaul of social security by Greenspan in 1983 that put it on a fairly sound basis; granted some tweeking is again needed but nothing that hasn't not been done before, like raising the age it starts, cutting back on early retirement benefits and indexing the wage cap to inflation.

Seneca

 

I have suggested this to no avail frequently on ET and to people I talk to. People who bought the Dow at 500 and rode it all the way up, somehow think that they are so hard working when really they rode the inflation boom and corporate profit plundering of the past 30 years. They bought 100k homes that are now worth 500k. There’s nothing they did to deserve that. A home is a home. Why should it be worth more in 30 years? The older generations complain that young people pay no taxes, but we pay the highest, cruelest tax of all. The inflation tax that goes to them. Not to mention the 11 billion dollar national debt and 50 billion in future obligations that they have left us.

To be completely fair however, I do see a lot of young people my age who are very lazy and want free stuff. But I think that happens mostly due to how unattainable it seems to achieve the same things our parents have. Think about it. A small townhouse where I live is still about 250k. Somebody making 25k a year would have to save 20% for 5 years just to get a down payment of 10%. That’s assuming prices don’t increase in the meantime. Of course you could make more money, but college is pretty much required for that nowadays. So before you buy the house, you’d have to pay off the huge student loans.

 

I’m sorry but I don’t understand your logic. You critisize a 20 something for racking up 80k in debt for college, but completely disregard the obvious problem as to why somebody actually has to go 80k in debt just to go to college.