Older Americans are 47 times richer than young
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
We (the young) didn't do anything, or ask for anything. But thanks to the speculative greed of previous generations, we're saddled with (even post-crash) unaffordable housing prices that favor the already-wealthy. Buying a home on a middle class working income is nigh impossible, unlike in their generation. So far from joining the speculators, we can't even buy a roof over our own heads in most places, especially places with jobs.
Our governmental services are collapsing in a large part due to the money we're pouring into pensions - pensions that previous generations voted to give themselves. Ones far more generous than anything history has ever seen. Everything can go, including our education system, but the pension is sacrosanct. Touch it and a legion of Baby Boomers will have you for lunch.
We're the generation of suckers. We (and probably our children, too) are the ones who will be paying for the ludicrous excesses of the Boomers, while getting nothing ourselves. Defined benefit pensions? Hah! Traditionally people pay into their future. We are stuck paying our past.
Bitter? Me? How could you tell?
Suggest looking forward, not back. What do we do next?
And on top of that, people are getting poorer. Even folks "protected" by traditionally pro-labour unions are being thrown under the bus to protect the pensions of its older members. The treatment of young union members by the organization that supposedly protects their rights is laughable if it weren't so damned unjust.
So yes, let's look forward. We face a desperate economic situation, in which we must all make deep cuts and great sacrifices if this country is to have a competitive future. Our education system has certainly paid the price. Our arts and culture, too. Taxes are rising, but yet the greatest liability we have is still pension funding.
The one quarter where no sacrifices, no compromises must be made. Toss the band program. Screw math textbooks. Fuck scientific research. The pension is holy! It must not be touched! So yes, we are looking at the future, and these people will doom it.
Even if we're not playing the blame game - there is not much we can do productively to save ourselves unless pension compromise can be brought to the table. Unfunded pension liabilities are the threat to our economic existence - the over-promised benefits are really going to gut us. Even if we continued along this path of "everything must go in the name of funding pension liabilities", it's still not enough. Without cuts to pensions we're screwed no matter what.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...
The elderly should have significantly more accumulated wealth than the young, because they've had longer to save. How much more, I couldn't say. But I'm always skeptical of attempts to tug at my heartstrings by pointing out that "those people" have more wealth than "these people" without some sort of systemic model to back up the complaint and explain what the proper level of inequality should be.
All things being equal and assuming some sort of positive savings rate and return on investment older people will _always_ be richer than younger people.
What's more when your denominator is so small (old / young) the increasing X% just becomes silly. If their average wealth decreases $600 (which is the projected impact of rising gas prices next year, I believe) the elderly will then be 56X as wealthy.
Personally, the fact that the average not-old person is swimming in consumer debt, has a 0% savings rate, and that by their own choosing is the real story and one that no one seems willing to touch.
By the time my parents were my age, they were married and had bought their first house in connecticut thanks to a loan from my dad's employer.
My parents bought property in connecticut, singapore, london, indonesia and did pretty well with that over the years. They rented out places and built a pretty decent nest egg. Property prices didn't go down between the times they bought and sold property.
It's a different world now. The best way to build wealth is to play both sides of the fence so you make money in both creation and destruction. For me, I'm betting that I can create software of value to enough people that I can build wealth. I've hedged my bets by getting some % of the current company I work for, but if I stay at this salary for the long haul, I will never have financial security.
It's a little bleak. I pity the people who swallowed the blue pill and work for some large corp. Some will get into the top tier and be phenomenally wealthy. The rest, I'm not so sure.
The average medicare recipient has only paid ~$75K in taxes but will extract >$500K in services.
The 'Greatest Generation' is bankrupting this country.
My parents are from this generation, they saved. I am trying to be the same way but it is very difficult. There are so many many temptations out there and we are heavily marketed too on every front.
Look, we have people lining up at night to buy iPhones, the latest video game, or to see a movie. That generation remembered people lining up for food, the draft, and other such true necessities of life then.
The "ME" generation is bankrupting America by wanting the rewards of a successful life without actually having to work for it. Instant gratification doesn't work, but it sure doesn't stop people running for office who promise it.
Not all of us buy expensive smartphones, have $500 car loans, thousand-dollar coffee shop bills, etc etc.
Similarly, not all of your beloved, vaunted Boomers were penny-pinching misers who saved all they got and avoided the drive-in, movies, and bars.
My impression (never having lived it 60s and 70s, of course) is that people then we just as excessive as we are now, or at least the marginal difference can't explain away the giant gap in wealth.
This is a sort of strange view, which isn't much in keeping with what I've read about the 1960s/70s. If anything they were something of a historical peak of decadence/entertainment, with people lining up for rock-show tickets and festivals (Woodstock being only the biggest of many), a huge explosion in car ownership (including a big increase in "muscle car" sales), big increases in sales for both the film and music industries as record numbers of people lined up to see the latest movie or buy the latest record, the growth of suburbia as suddenly everyone needed their own yard and 3-bedroom home, a big wave of people replacing their B&W televisions with fancy new color models, etc., etc.
However, it turned out well for them in net-worth terms because splurging on that suburban home in 1975 turned out to be a good real-estate investment, whether they bought it for that reason or not.
Also, is it adjusted for inflation? You could buy a car for $1k back in the day.
I can't imagine baby boomers wanting to watch network news or read mainstream websites that bring light to these inequalities. It's eyeballs and wallets that dictate content, and it's the boomers who have both.