Interesting factoid - there is a selection bias involved with working longer. Aging Boomers are more educated than the generations that came before them (yes Millennials even a bit more) and with education comes prolonged productivity. Plus the most educated and healthiest tend to work the longest. The less productive (less educated and unhealthiest) workers stop early.
Many aging Boomers are not working past traditional retirement ages because they have to, despite many experiencing a squeeze on their resources from both sides, but because do what they do well, efficiently, reliably, and enjoy doing it.
On the other hand, the first nine years of the eighteen year baby boom are the Vietnam War draftees. While it sure sucks to graduate high school and either have dead end job prospects or face onerous student loans - if you turned 18 in 1968 - prime boom time - you had a one in three chance of ending up in Vietnam before your draft eligibility ran out. Some boomers had it easy - some boomers got drafted and ended up fighting the Viet Cong in the jungles - which I think is somewhat more onerous than just having a lot of student loan debt.
I’m a pre-no-deferment draft dodge baby. My father was told to report and only the signed note from my mother’s doctor on a positive pregnancy test kept him from reporting to Basic. A lot of my 1965-1968 friends are draft dodge babies. (Yes, some people now join the military because they don’t have many other pragmatic options - but they do have SOME options - there aren’t enough long haul truck drivers - breathe, drive and pass a drug test (and have reached 21) and you at least have that choice if you don’t want to end up in Afghanistan. Better than getting your girlfriend pregnant to avoid the war.)
People in Congress have voted themselves excellent pensions and salaries. For most Boomers this isn’t something we could actually vote on.
Never in my working life. My parents’ generation, the people who had the kids that would become the baby boom, now they could do this. A cab driver or a high-school history teacher could buy a house, have 2.5 kids or even more, take the kids to Disneyland or someplace every couple of years. In my working lifetime, there were some high earners who could do this, but the cab drivers and high-school teachers found everything just a little out of reach, and when they made more money, then it was just a little more out of reach.
No; the people, and they may be Boomers, who call Millenials lazy are, for the most part, people who work with them and find they don’t have much of a work ethic. I’m sure this isn’t true of all so-called Millenials. (I don’t even know exactly what a Millenial is.)
Millenials are responsible for Windows 8, right? Worst generation ever. (jk) No, seriously, my son, who I think is one of your Millenials, got a job at the age of 24 where he was out-earning both of his parents. That is to say, he was earning more at 24 than both of us together, and I don’t mean than both of us together earned when we were 24, I mean what we earned the year he was 24 (and we were proud of him, and still are). All my sons except the one who’s still a teenager have broken the salary barrier of one or both parents within a year and a half of getting out of college, and they don’t even have advanced degrees. We both do. (We will not go into the utility of said degrees.)
Hey, this is exactly what every generation thinks.
Really. Every paycheck for my entire life I have contributed to Medicare for old people. Every paycheck for my entire life I have contributed to Social Security for old people. During a lot of those years I was raising a family and I sure could have used the extra money, since these great salaries you think all Boomers got did not materialize in my case. (I am not complaining, it was okay.) Excuse me for wanting to get some of that money back as a benefit in my dotage.
I will cop to this: there were a lot of us, and unlike previous generations when we entered the job market we entered it big. Men and women, where previously it had mostly been men. So not only were there a lot of us, but we were all out there competing for jobs. We were also the most educated generation with most of us going a step or two beyond what our parents had done, but we tended to stay in school longer, as a generation, to get that education. When we finally started earning decent money, we did that as a large group, too, which of course, by the nature of economics, drove up the prices of everything.
So sayeth the fool who boasted and broadcasted about a cool million plus payday. All due the exertions, knowledge and perseverance of his great grands. BUt i see no mention of your life on easy street didya spend all available resources already?http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12915748#poststop
Unfortunately you are mischaracterizing what my cite said.
86% of those who work full-time in the private sector (and 99%+ of those who work for government) have “good jobs” in the sense of “jobs that provide health insurance”. Thus your statement that by and large, jobs that provide health insurance are no longer available is wrong.
No, I didn’t spend it. I don’t even have access to it yet. That is one of the things I worry about. That is one of the things that influences my viewpoint. Natural gas royalties come from one side of my family and are intended for very specific people and purposes. I can’t make the same mistakes that most lottery winners do and start funding people who had ample time and resources to support themselves at all stages of life. In any case, I don’t depend on that money and behave for now like it isn’t even there. I am still saving enough for my own retirement so that I won’t be in a huge bind even if someone embezzles it al.l
Yeah! One of which is, if you have something someone wants, you can charge money for it. If a lot of people want that thing you can jack up the price to whatever they can afford. I’m sure there is some simple economics axiom to explain this a lot more elegantly, but it’s natural human competitive behavior.
For example, post WWII a lot of houses were built, and they were cheap, and pretty much everybody in the middle class bought one. At the time, there were not that many two-income couples. Mostly it was the man. Maybe the woman worked until she had the first child, or maybe not even then. It was pretty much thought that a woman would be in the workforce for a little while and only in the workforce for a long time if she couldn’t find a husband. (I am speaking here of the middle class, which was a lot of Americans.) A lender, considering whether to offer a mortgage, did not even consider the wife’s salary, if she had one, because she would probably quit her job sooner or later so why bother. After all, they didn’t have to.
That is not to say the lender couldn’t consider it. But lenders like a sure thing, so they didn’t.
Then some law passed, I think around 1974, that said they HAD to consider the wife’s income right along with the husband’s.
So the houses are the same, but look at what happened to the prices. Now, what with the wife’s income having to be considered, they could sell them for a lot more. And since they could, they did, and people still bought them.
Only now, instead of a family with an ordinary lone income being able to afford a house, it took two incomes or one income that was a lot better.
It took awhile for this bump to filter into all the markets, but eventually it did.
PS I don’t think you can blame the boomers for that one, either. The oldest of them would have been around late 20s when that happened and obviously it had been percolating awhile. It didn’t really benefit them so much, either, merely guaranteed that more women would have to enter the work force, but that was going to happen anyway.
Missed edit window. I see we have two major complaints here. (1) the baby boomers “voted themselves” (somehow) the biggest pension and retirement benefits ever, and (2) they don’t have enough money to retire so they keep working and clogging up the system.
I went to Rice University back in the '80s. When I started, tuition was $4,400/year ($9,500 in 2014 dollars). At the time, Rice was relatively inexpensive for a private school, as it was subsidized by its endowment. For comparison, Northwestern University charged about $11K in tuition per year ($23.5K in 2014 dollars).
Today, Rice charges $40K in tuition, and Northwestern charges $46.8K. Even after correcting for inflation, that is a 320% increase in tuition for Rice, and nearly 100% increase for Northwestern.
This represents a huge increase in tuition, while conversely, financial aid availability has dropped precipitously since the 1980s.
Tuition has shot up astronomically. I don’t know how anyone can deny this.
But to be fair to the Boomers, their parents weren’t expected to shoulder the cost of college. A lot of Boomers paid their own freight through grants, loans, and work study.
But the parents of college students today are expected to share the financial burden. I’ve heard stories about families taking out second mortgages to finance college educations for multiple kids. Only for those kids to “boomerang” as they try to get their post-college footing. No wonder so many Boomers are working past retirement.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Certainly tuition has increased greatly. But to use an example you gave, someone with a minimum wage job in 1985 could not have worked and paid Northwestern’s tuition. Rice might be an exception (as is Cooper Union) , but my point is that the people who worked their way through a bachelor’s degree when “It was nothing special” and " it was easy, school was cheap and jobs were good" (as the poster I was responding to stated) weren’t making $4 or so an hour (about $8000 a year) and paying Northwestern’s $11K tuition.Those people were paying less tuition at less expensive colleges and/or attending part-time. Apples and oranges.
I noted this in my post; that’s why I brought up Northwestern for comparison.
I originally thought there was no question about this, but I concede that it’s more complicated than I may have implied.
It’s undeniable that federal college financial aid started big with the original post-WWII G.I. Bill and continued to expand until Reagan’s election in 1980.
This 1995 paper here includes a timeline of federal financial aid, and has figures showing that while overall financial aid continued to increase (albeit at a slower pace), it has switched from mostly grants (pre-1980) to mostly loans (post-1980). This is one of the reasons that many current students are leaving college with massive amounts of debt.
However, aid in the form of grants was more available then. It was also easier for a student to declare themselves independent, and not have to include their parent’s income in the FAFSA. A student could certainly pay for even a private college with a combination of aid in the form of need-based grants along with a minimum-wage job. I know this, because I did this for the year in college that wasn’t covered by my ROTC scholarship.
None of this is true today. My son (a senior in high school), has absolutely no way to pay for a private college (or many public colleges, for that matter), without tens of thousands of dollars from me, in combination with huge loans. Even if he gets some merit-based aid, the money being charged by universities today is ridiculous.
For example, the cost to attend Northwestern today (including room and board) is over $62K/year. Not only is this beyond the capability of someone with a minimum-wage job to pay, it’s beyond the capability of someone with well-paying job to pay.
We’re in a similar position - not so much because the parents lived such a wacked-out lifestyle, but because of a lifetime of underemployment and poor decisions (and some genuine bad luck, versus the self-inflicted kind).
The “subsidize their decisions” comes in when the alternative is for them to be absolutely homeless. There are few rules in life but one of them is you don’t put the parents on the street; another is “you don’t move them in with you if the likely result would be a murder or two”.
The parents actually predated the Boomers (both were small children during WWII), and the “kids” were late boomers - and the collective is definitely among the 2/3 who have not saved. We’re the only family of the 3 adult kids who has anything saved. The others are paycheck-to-paycheck. Which means we’re the ones to bail out the folks, and yeah, I resent it.
I’ve spent 40 years working, will work another 10, and have to be prepared to leave a substantial estate to support a special needs child. All in all, if Gen X or Gen Y resents us for having a decent retirement, they can bite me - but they won’t have much chance; I’ve calculated that I need to die at age 75 to make all that happen.