As the oldest of the Boomers* – including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and yours truly – reach 60 next year, expect an escalation of media prattle about the dire things that will happen to the country when “we” start collecting Social Security benefits.
Above all, expect us to be demonized as greedy, self-indulgent, hypocritical and above all, unimaginably rich ingrates who HAVE SOME NERVE feeding at the federal trough.
In fact, the onslaught has already started.
The terror felt by younger generations at the prospect of going broke paying Social Security and Medicare benefits to their parents is not a bogus fear, by any means.
Nonetheless, by characterizing Boomers as an enemy hoard out to steal the public treasury, the youngsters consistently fail to recognize that the problem is not of “our” making: the great majority of politicians who have pirated the Social Security Trust fund for decades aren’t Boomers at all, but members of the so-called “Greatest Generation”.
Ironically, this teflon-like cohort, which among other things engineered the country’s despicable support of a string of anti-democratic, evil foreign governments**, somehow has managed to escape the kind of bitter criticism and resentment which has dogged Boomers since we emerged from the womb.
So, young folk, don’t blame us for the sorry state of Social Security. Like you, we and our employers have been paying into this Ponzi scheme for our whole working lives and like you, we’ve been played like suckers.
The Bush-era media would have one believe that not only are Boomers unworthy of publically-funded entitlement programs because of our despicable moral standards (how DARE we have presumed to support Civil Rights and the Anti-War movement); we are, to boot, so well-off that we are financially undeserving as well.
In fact, if you read the pundits, you’d think that all Boomers have fat investment portfolios, own trophy homes and can look forward to receiving inheritances with a cumulative net present value in the hundreds of billions.
The reality is that, like the rest of society, Boomer wealth is highly concentrated: the top 1 percent hold a GREATER share of total net worth than the bottom 80 percent.
Last month, a local research group, MassINC, published the results of a survey indicating that 30% of Massachusetts Boomers have saved less than $50,000 for retirement; among those, 13% haven’t saved anything at all.
It seems to me that a lot of so-called boomer “wealth” is completely hypothetical, i.e., home equity and assumed inheritance. To the first: housing prices are declining in Massachusetts as in the rest of the US. To the second: how do the pundits know that the “Greatest Generation” plans to pass their accumulated assets to their rotten, detested kids, rather than to their grandkids or, for that matter, to shelter-bound kitties and doggies?
Personally, I know very few people under age 60 who are “well set” for retirement. Of the group that is well-positioned, ALL are married couples and ALL have ethnically neutral or at least socially acceptable last names. All of them are physically beautiful and, thus, valued by the culture and adored by their children. NONE of them have ever coped with a layoff or job discrimination or for that matter, a total loss of income due to illness or fate’s arbitrary whimsy.
In other words, they are a charmed group. They may, in fact, be in the majority of Boomers, but they are not representative of ALL of “us”.
Which is to say that at least in my circle, anecdote conforms to statistics.
I have no resolution to any of this except to recognize that our current corrupt, inept federal government is unwilling to do what is necessary to fix the problems with funding Social Security. So, it’ll be up to those individuals not born lucky to cope – on their own.
Thus, I predict a return to the days that Social Security was designed to correct: we will have a generation of older people, mostly women, living in poverty.
Unlike the 1930’s when Social Security was created, though, I predict that society simply will not care. After all, given the resurgence of its Calvinist view of wealth and poverty, society will rationalize that since these people didn’t “take care of themselves”, they are unworthy of assistance from anyone else.
Mark my words: it’ll happen.
*Americans born between 1946 and 1964
**Since 1954: Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile