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Dec. 2, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:48
2052 Laziness, Greed, Entitlement - Baby Boomers Defined
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
So we have, I guess, just a couple of weeks until the boomers begin to retire en masse, right?
So it's 46 to about 63, 64 is the boomer generation.
I was thinking this week about my opinions about the boomers.
You may not care about my opinions.
Perfectly valid. Feel free to turn this off.
And this is not scientific, but...
But here are some thoughts about the boomers.
I think that every generation has a responsibility to, you know, you get past a certain torch called freedom, liberty, particularly economic liberty, which is vastly underestimated in terms of its value to human society.
Every generation gets past this torch called liberty, and I believe that the final judgment of that generation Must coalesce around the question of whether they kept that torch alight, maybe had it burn a little bit brighter, or whether they peed on it from a great height and snuffed the mofo out.
And I would argue that the boomers really fall into the second category.
So first of all, the boomers are by far the richest, the best educated, most traveled, most sophisticated, best read generation with the most economic opportunities that has ever existed on this planet.
They literally had goodies showered upon them from on high.
And they were bequeathed the world.
Again, this is according to the standard narrative, which I have issues with, but we'll just go with the standard narrative for now.
They were bequeathed the world that had repelled Socialism, international socialism, had repelled.
Fascism had kept communism contained within the Eastern Bloc countries and had saved the world from tyranny, dictatorship and destruction.
This is the world that they were bequeathed and 40 million people died in World War II, were murdered in World War II to protect the freedoms.
And they were born into a world of relative peace, particularly in Europe.
They were born into a world of...
In America, too, there was the Cold War.
There were fears of the Cold War. But, I mean, I grew up with those fears as well and the next generation.
So that wasn't specific to the boomers.
But they grew up in unprecedented economic opportunities, astounding possibilities, a 40-year housing boom, rapid rises in income and productivity, relative peace, at least compared to the previous 50 years.
And... Amazing opportunities, expanded educational capacities with the GI Bill, and then all of the stuff that happened in the 60s, stable home lives, again, economic opportunities, job security, wealth, and so on.
They really did get, I think, about the greatest goodies that have ever been showered on any generation in human history.
And with all of those benefits, you would really expect that the world that they would pass along to their children would be a better world than the one that they found it.
If the generation that was previous to them had managed to fight their way out of the Great Depression and World War II and provide relatively stable and secure home lives for their children, they certainly, you could argue, had passed along a world that was better.
Was it something that the baby boomers did as well?
Well, No.
No, I think, philosophically speaking, I think that what happened to the baby boomers was the great collapse of collective religiosity, a growth in I-me-me-eye, selfish, tentacle-grasping secularism that I think has provided pretty much the shallowest, pettiest, greediest generation.
That history has ever seen.
Most spoiled, most entitled, most manipulative, most verbally acute and morally challenged, I guess is the way that I would put it.
And this is an important conversation for us to have because, I mean, these graying babies are about to eat us all, right?
I mean, as we sort of sail into their retirement years with debt, let alone, I mean, no excess to pay for their retirement and massive debts.
So one of the things I think that happened was, and you can see this sort of in the 60s, this sort of spoiled generation, they sort of grow up without the same...
Rigid and, I mean, in many ways stultifying but very firm social constraints that existed prior to the boomer generation.
You know, the sort of strict Puritan slash Calvinistic ethic of, you know, work hard and save and defer gratification and do not buy what you cannot afford and, you know, put aside money for a rainy day and be self-sufficient and Develop your social circle so that you have a hedge against disaster and be there for other people and, you know, all of the stuff that I think was a fairly collective vibe that was going on.
Certainly, if you look at the growth of friendly societies in the U.S. in particular, you can see how particularly the poor got together, collectivized risk and pooled resources and got insurance and helped each other.
And that really was the focal point in many ways of the church, which was to have a hub where social need and progress and possibilities and contacts and resources could be shared so that people didn't sort of grow up alone.
Now, with the fall of religiosity that really, really began in the 60s, And this was not a fall of mysticism.
I guess religiosity...
I call it me-ism.
And me-ism is when you get rid of religion, but you retain mysticism.
And I have much less respect for mysticism than I do for religion.
Because religion actually demands that you do stuff.
Religion has rules. Religion has strictures.
Religion has goals. Religion has, you know, think of others before yourself.
It combats, in many ways, selfishness.
It combats isolation. It combats greed.
It combats entitlement and so on.
And this generation grew up Where that stuff just collapsed.
I mean, that stuff really...
Now, what happened was, of course, that me-ism means that you have a vague spirituality that gives you all of the benefits of mysticism without any of the rules of religion.
And that creates, you know, to me, selfish monsters of abstract delusions.
So in the 60s, you see, I mean, there's this turn to drugs, there's this turn to casual sex, There's this sort of instant gratification, a denial of responsibility, a denial of the deferral of gratification, a denial really of the needs and strictures of adulthood, taking responsibility, saving money, and hopefully, if you like, having a family, being mature, being wise, helping others, and so on.
There really wasn't much of that going on in the 60s.
And I know I'm painting with a broad brush, but, you know, forgive me for the ramblings.
And so sort of free love, free drugs, tune in, turn on, drop out, that it all became about navel-gazing and my particular pleasures in the moment without a sense particularly of others or helping others, this pull towards Eastern mysticism, this rejection of Western religiosity and the attendant moral rules.
And so what happened was, within the secular world, religion sort of collapsed.
And In the ruins, the hippies danced free.
They did not say to themselves, wow, this protective though inhibiting structure has collapsed.
So what we need to do is we need to go and find or make or reason or discover or search for some other way that social rules can be brought into being and Peacefully enforced without needing a big old white-bearded guy in the sky hurling thunderbolts and threats of hell at us.
So the great temptation is when unjust rules or irrational rules fall away, there's this sense of enormous liberation, the sense that we are now free of all strictures, that we can fly higher than gravity could formally allow.
That we can pierce the clouds with our abstractions, that we can vault mountains that we could not vault before.
Rationality and reality fall away and a glowing rainbow construct of fantasy castle-dom is where we want to go and live.
There is this sense that when the old rules are broken, we don't need rules anymore.
And that is...
A very dangerous and destructive fantasy.
When old rules fall away, when irrational or superstitious or religious rules fall away, the hunt must be on for rational rules.
The hunt must be on for philosophy.
When superstition falls away, the true rigor and discipline and strength and certainty of philosophy is what is needed.
But, That was not apparently required.
When the school collapsed, it was recess forever, and irresponsibility forever, and greed, and instant gratification, and all the rules of the deferral of gratification, of the subjugation of desires to other people's needs, particularly their children's needs, when all of that went out the window, there was an orgy of self-gratification that has lasted for decades.
And I would argue that the financial scandals and the growth of statism is a mere result of that orgy of self-gratification.
Why should I defer rules if there's no hell?
Why should I defer... Sorry, why should I obey rules?
Why should I defer gratification?
Why should I subjugate my immediate pleasures for the needs of the future or others if there's no...
Sky Ghost, to punish me, should I veer from the path?
There is no path. And the only people who obey these kinds of rules are suckers, are self-hating, self-over-regulating, repressed Puritans.
That the goal is to be free, to skate along the thin ice of a collapsing moral universe, along the edge for the joy and excitement of the view, which is apparently of the universe, but turns out to be only of the diminishing self.
So, I think that the boomers became...
They took all of these gifts, they took all of these amazing opportunities, and they squandered them.
And there was no longer, you know, with the fall of religion and with the fall of...
External rules. There was no development of internal rules.
It sort of reminds me, like, when I... Okay, after high school, I mean, I've sort of been on my own mostly since I was about 15.
And after high school, I had no money to go to college.
So I went and worked as a gold panner and a prospector and an explorer up in the unbelievably harsh northern wastes up in northern Canada.
I did that for about 18 months.
Then I did it again for some time after that.
Because you can't spend any money out there, so I went out.
Now, when I went to college after that time working in a tent and snowshoeing and drilling for gold and all that kind of stuff, I was so keen to be in college.
I mean, I was so keen to study.
I was like, I remember some girl asked me out my second week of college and I didn't have any essays due for like a month or two, but I'd already started working on my first essay.
I was so keen to be there.
I mean, I didn't go out drinking.
I mean, I did all that stuff when I was in my mid to late teens.
So yeah, I got drunk like four times, never did it again.
You notice this, that the sort of people who have had the most external rules imposed upon them, when those rules get relaxed or when they escape from under those rules, then they just, it's an orgy of self-indulgence.
It's one of the bad things about overly strict rules or externally imposed or punishment-based rules rather than learning-based principles, right?
Punishment-based rules is do this or you will be punished, which teaches the child nothing but the avoidance of punishment.
And then when that punishment is no longer there, there's an orgy of self-indulgence that results because there's been no internalization or rationalization Of sensible guidelines.
And, you know, sort of like kids with candy on Halloween, right?
The rules are all relaxed and there's no particular sense of why.
It's just no chocolate, no chocolate. Okay, chocolate.
Eat till you get sick. So, that's sort of what it reminded me of.
And I think that's really been the story of the last couple of decades.
Because also, if you look, in the 60s, when there was this self-indulgence, there was also a lot of people got married.
And then a lot of people, as this began to even flow uphill, right?
The self-indulgence began to flow uphill throughout society.
And what you saw was, I mean, in the 70s, was the great catastrophe for children was the staggering rise in the divorce rates.
I mean, unbelievable rises in the divorce rates.
I mean, there were things like orgies in key parties.
I think that was pretty much the minority.
But there was a staggering 300% rise in the divorce rate.
And the divorce rate, divorces have been absolutely catastrophic for children.
If there's one thing that you can choose, if you could choose before you were born, if there was one characteristic you could choose about your family, it would be to not be raised by a single mom.
That is the most disastrous thing, most disastrous single thing in terms of predicting your child's good or bad outcome.
Divorce was catastrophic for children.
But, you see, the boomer generation had not been raised to defer gratification for the sake of living for others.
And so you get a generation that, well, they're discontented with their marriages.
They don't really like their marriages.
So, you know, for no particular reason, I mean, they may just be unhappy, they may be going through a rough patch, they may be not getting along for a while, maybe they want to go and have, you know, funky monkey sex or something, but there's just divorces.
And... It was not always because of abuse.
I mean, there was just a kind of discontentedness that fueled divorce.
And this was catastrophic for children.
There was also, I think, when you don't have principles, which the fall of religiosity before the rise of philosophy, there was a Dostoevskyian vacuum of principles.
And in an absence of principles, All that guides you is immediate self-interest.
There's no point deferring self-interest because there are no principles.
In the absence of nutrition, you will eat what tastes good and get sick thereby.
The reason you eat vegetables rather than chocolate is because you have some knowledge of nutrition.
In the absence of principles, all we have is immediate self-gratification.
And that's the drugs, that's the sex, that's the divorce.
And what happened was the massive growth...
In the welfare state, in socialism, in public sector unions, in, you know, it was in the 60s that it became impossible to fire teachers in the government schools, which was the beginning of an unbelievable and catastrophic decline in educational standards throughout the West.
Now, why would you oppose something like, let's just take the firing of teachers.
Well, if there's no principles, then you do that which is easiest in the moment.
Of course. I mean, why would you do anything else?
And so there's no reason to oppose things that feel better in the moment.
Like, hey, we've got a welfare state.
We'll take care of the poor. Hey, we've got Medicare and Medicaid.
Now, sick people without money will be taken care of.
Hey, teachers don't want to get fired.
Hey, professors want tenure.
Well, you know, it's easier in the moment to just give in.
There's no particular principles to fight for.
So let's just give everyone what they want.
And that's how this, you know, there's no principles.
What would you stand up for?
Is there a principle called let's not use force to get things what you want that I'm willing to stand by, that I'm willing to plant my flag deep into, that I'm willing to put down my roots of integrity, yay, to the very center of the earth so that I cannot be budged by any storm or wind or flying debris?
No, there was no reason to do any of that.
No principles. So you just appease, you appease, you let people have what they want in the moment.
That's what happens.
That's what happens when you live in a vacuum of principles.
No principles. And so you get the growth of the welfare state.
The former generation, which was save, save, save, prepare, prepare, prepare, but no principles.
Right? And so there was this greed.
And When you don't have a value called thrift, savings, prepare for a rainy day, then you can be bought off, then you can go into debt, then you can buy stuff you can't afford, and you can be bribed by the political system for your allegiance.
And that's really the fundamental issue, and this is where I think the boomers have the most to answer for.
The other terrible thing, we'll get to that in a sec, but the other terrible thing that occurs, the boomers, in my experience, have been the least apologetic generation in history.
I have never seen a boomer apologize for anything, and Lord knows they have stuff that they need to apologize for, right?
Massive growth of the state, massive growth of the state, decrepit state of education in the public sector and to a large degree in the private sector.
Environmental degradation. The national debt.
My God in heaven.
Can we just get an apology or two for the national debt?
Can that be something that we could expect?
No. See, without principles, there's nothing to apologize for.
If immediate self-gratification is the only thing that's making you tick, is the only reason you haul your entitled ass out of bed in the morning, then what would you ever have to apologize for?
Right? I mean, if I eat a candy bar, I don't have to apologize to anyone.
There are no principles involved in that.
Self-gratification is the key.
Have boomers ever apologized to the generation that followed for the extremely negative effects of divorce on children?
No, and look, I'm not saying that nobody should ever get divorced.
Okay, but recognize that you married the wrong person, you had kids with the wrong person, and now you're getting divorced, which makes your kids, it really, really makes life tough for your kids.
So just apologize for that.
You don't have to have intent to end up apologizing.
You don't have to have ill intent to apologize.
I mean, I apologize if I bump my daughter on the head accidentally.
I mean, there's no ill intent, but you apologize anyway.
I mean, has there ever been?
I mean, just think about this. Because remember, the boomers who are retiring now, they were, I mean, if you're old like me, not as old as the boomers, then they were your teachers when you were a kid.
They were your bosses when you first got into the workforce and probably flowed upwards as you ascended through the workforce.
They remained your bosses.
They are the political leaders.
They are the union heads.
They are, you know, all of the daycare teachers.
These were all boomers. And they made a royal frack of the planet.
They made a royal frack-fest of the planet.
The moment the boomers began to get some sort of political ascendancy, which was in the 70s, you know, America and the world went off the gold standard, you start to get the rise of catastrophic national debts, and this sort of feel-good, fuck-the-future philosophy is why there's been such a catastrophic growth in the state,
because Let's say LBJ comes in with the Great Society and you have to have a generation that's used to credit to not expect taxes to rise to pay for massive new social programs.
That's really important, right?
So all of the spending is going to go on for the poor.
All of the jobs for the poor, education for the poor, spending on the poor, welfare for the poor, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor.
Well, massive government spending.
In the older generation, it would have been expected that, okay, so the first thing we have to expect is a huge rise in our taxes.
And when there's no concomitant rise in the taxes...
Then a skeptical, intelligent, principled-based population would say, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We're spending all this money, but we're not being charged for it?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not fair. That is against my principles, because if I'm voting for this stuff, I can't pass the bill on to the future generations.
If I want the welfare state, if I want Medicare and Medicaid, if I want increases in Social Security, if I want all of these things, if I want massive increases in public sector pensions...
Then I better damn well pay for them because it's unfair to burden my children and my grandchildren with that debt.
But that didn't happen with the boomers.
See, everybody wants to blame fiat currency.
Everybody wants to blame the Federal Reserve.
Everyone wants to blame the abandonment of the gold standard.
But the real question is, well, how the hell could people get away with this?
And what was the demand?
What was the draw?
What was the demand for all of this stuff?
For all of this stuff?
See, when you let go of principles, then shoveling a bunch of money at the poor and deferring that bill to the next generation makes perfect sense.
Why? You'd have no principle called theft, no principle called property rights, no principle called personal responsibility or the deferral of gratification, no principle called...
Deal with the immediate consequences of that which you prefer when you choose the actions, as Dr.
Phil says, you choose the consequences.
There's no principle behind that.
And so if you sort of feel, well, it makes me feel good to help the poor, and it makes me feel good to not have to pay for it, and I just kind of want to blank that out, how that's going to affect things in the future, then that's what's going to be supplied to you.
Politicians are exquisite weather vanes of the social winds, and politicians can only sell bullshit to people who are willing to eat bullshit.
Politicians can only sell the fantasies of goodies in the here and now with infinite deferral of debt into the future to people who are willing to swallow that gassy pill, right?
It's not the supply that you need to look at.
It's the demand that you need to look at when you want to figure out how to change the world, right?
Getting rid of your currency won't change a damn thing if the population It's still into fantasy.
And we all know this when it comes to the drug war, right?
So let's say that you could cut the supply of marijuana by 50%.
What would that do?
Well, as long as the demand is constant, all that will happen is it will draw more people into, right?
It'll drive up the price of marijuana and will draw more people into supplying marijuana and you'll get right back to equilibrium because it is on the demand side.
That the primary drivers are.
Not on the supply side. So it is on the demand for free goodies.
It is on the demand for instant feel-good gratification.
That is what is driving fiat currency.
That is what is driving the abandonment of the gold standard.
That is what is driving national debts and national deficits.
It's not on the supply side.
Look, people can offer you all the free crap in the world that they want.
You've got Nigerian scam emails and penis magnifying emails in your junk folder all the time.
You don't say yes to that stuff, right?
People offer you free stuff all the time.
Just say no, because you know there's no such thing as a free lunch, because everybody knows that, because that's what the boomers...
And this is the weird thing, right? Is that you could say, well, the boomers didn't have any idea About property rights.
They had no principles.
I would not agree with that.
And again, you can search your memory, but this is my very clear and distinct memory.
One of my curses and blessings to remember almost every single day of my life.
I remember getting incredible lectures from boomer teachers about respect for property and the deferral of gratification.
Incredible, bottomless, soul-grinding, mind-powdering, gristle-of-the-mill, soul-crushing lectures from boomers.
Always and forever about the need to defer gratification, about the need to save.
I mean, if you had a boomer parent who gave you an allowance, what did you say?
If you said you wanted to borrow against your future year's allowance, they'd say, no.
You get your allowance, you either save it or you spend it, but you're not going to get an infinite amount of credit.
And then a government official comes to that same boomer who's lecturing his children about the need to defer gratification to save and be thrifty and be responsible and blah, blah, blah, and comes in and says, I can give you all the free shit in the world.
Just sign away your children's lives.
They'll be like, hey, I'm down for that, right?
So you can't say that the boomers didn't have a sense of moral rules because they used those moral rules and inflicted those moral rules on their children, always and forever.
I mean, and if you doubt that, did you ever lose a school library book?
What happened? Did you get lectures?
They say, ah, you know, stuff comes, stuff goes.
It's, you know, paid for by the government.
It's debt. Forget about it. Don't worry about it.
No. It was a big problem, right?
It was a big problem. Did you ever deface school property?
Were you given lectures about school property and respect for property and so on?
But this is the same generation that was selling your property, your soul, your life, your future, your brain marrow down the river to every foreign creditor who would hand them a thin, blood-soaked dime.
So they're not people who didn't know about moral rules.
They're just people who created massive exceptions for themselves while inflicting triple the moral rules on their children.
Which, unfortunately, is a very common pattern.
So, I'm going to end up here.
Because this debate really needs to be had.
Because there's no money.
There's no money for Social Security.
There's no money for retirement. And it's only going to get worse.
So I'll have you guess when this was written.
Just have a guess as I'm reading it and then let me know.
By 2030, when all the boomers will have reached 65, Social Security alone will be running an annual cash deficit of 766 billion dollars.
If Medicare hospital insurance is included, and if both programs continue according to current law, the combined cash deficit that year will be $1.7 trillion.
Can you imagine a deficit of $1.7 trillion?
What a catastrophe. According to a recent poll, Americans under 35 are much more likely to believe in UFOs than to believe that they'll ever receive Social Security benefits.
And this is what I mean when I talk about When the government comes to you with free stuff and defers the payment to future generations, you get a massive amount of free stuff.
Baby boomers have enjoyed, for instance, a 40-year housing boom, or at least until recently.
And one of the things that's important to remember is that when a free market system gets socialized, You get about a generation of, I think, pretty amazing efficiencies.
I mean, I just talked about sort of the Canadian system here, which was in the 60s socialized.
It turned into a government-run system.
Well, so let's say you have some 50-year-old doctor.
He's been a doctor for like 20 years or more.
And he's developed all the work habits of a free market doctor, right?
All of the work habits, all of the relationships with his patients, his whole.
And he was drawn into that field because he wants all of the benefits and restrictions and disciplines of the free market.
Now, you socialize that system.
It's not like that doctor's personality or work habits or history or relationship with his parents suddenly and immediately changes to become some lazy, fat ass, bureaucratic, socialistic nightmare.
No. The guys continue to do house calls.
The guy is going to continue to work 80 hours a week if that's what necessary, because that's the way he was raised.
That's his work ethic. That's what he does.
When you socialize the free market, Everything becomes free, but things aren't crappy right away.
It takes a long time, usually a generation or so, for things to decay into the quagmire of bureaucratic, socialistic, lazy-ass, entitled crap that people who inherit the later incarnations of that socialist system Come to expect, come to see, come to realize is the state.
I mean, look at NASA, right?
When NASA first went, it first became a government agency, it recruited all of these engineers from the free market, from the private sector.
So they did some incredible stuff.
I mean, they sent a guy to the moon and back.
And then it hardens and gets sclerotic and gets all this fatty tissue of bureaucratic shit that piles up in the veins in the system.
And then you end up with, we'll run the space shuttle back and forth for 30 years.
So when the boomers socialized stuff, they got massive benefits.
They got stuff for free.
They got a pretty disciplined and efficient workforce in that newly freshly minted socialized area.
And it took a generation or two for things to go to shit completely.
So this is another thing. I mean, not only did they get all of these amazing things without paying for them, but they got an amazing amount of quality without paying for it.
Whereas now, even if we don't pay for stuff, we do not get the same level of quality.
So, when I talk about getting stuff for free, what I mean is something like this.
So, a typical retired couple on Social Security at this time, with $30,000 in total cash income paid, on average, only $790 in federal taxes.
Meanwhile, their son and daughter-in-law, struggling to raise a child on the same income, had a total federal tax burden of $7,000, if you include both the FICA tax they paid and that paid by their employers.
So a retired couple is paying $790 in federal taxes with no kids to raise, with no kids to put through college, with no house to buy.
They're paying a tiny bit in federal taxes, but their kids, on the same income, are paying over $7,000 in federal taxes.
The present system's true believers dress up Social Security and Medicare in the reassuring rhetoric of insurance and pensions and claim that beneficiaries are only getting back what they paid in.
They're wrong. The majority of today's beneficiaries are getting back far more than they ever paid, ever paid in FICA contributions, given the average life expectancy An average one earner couple retiring today will get about $123,000 more out of Social Security than the average earner and his or her employer ever paid into it,
plus interest. Amid the employer's contributions, calculate only the payback on the personal taxes paid by the employee, and the windfall rises to $173,000.
With Medicare thrown in, it rises to nearly $310,000.
More out of these systems than you ever paid in much of that tax-free.
These are not quote earned benefits but unearned windfalls that our children will have to pay for and certainly will never enjoy themselves.
Consider that the federal government has already promised to today's adults 8.3 trillion dollars in future Social Security benefits beyond the value of the taxes they have paid to date.
A figure over 250 times as great as the unfunded liabilities of all the private sector pensions in America.
When our children look back, look into the Social Security Trust Fund and find nothing there but IOUs with their own names listed as payers, they will surely wonder how we could have treated them so shabbily.
And this is what I mean when I say that the savings collapsed, right?
So from an average of 8.1% of GDP in the 1960s, the net national savings rate dipped to 7.2% in the 1970s and then plunged to 3.9% in the 1980s to 2.3% in the 1990s.
A collapse in savings. Now, a collapse in savings is, of course, you know, when there's more money around, means that people are buying more.
They're buying stuff on credit. They're not deferring gratification.
A collapse in savings...
It means less reinvestment in capital goods.
It means less reinvestment in productivity.
And productivity is just about everything in the long run.
Productivity of workers is the essence and foundation of wealth in society.
And so when you don't save as much, you end up with a diminished productivity per worker, which is one of the reasons why the average worker's wages have barely budged since the 1970s.
Now, check this out.
When it comes to our retirement plans, we, i.e.
America, are a nation in denial.
About 9 out of 10 boomers say they want to retire at or before age 65.
About 6 out of 10 before the age of 60.
More than two-thirds say that they will be able to live where they want and live comfortably throughout their retirement years.
A stunning 71% expect to maintain in retirement a standard of living the same as or better than what they enjoy during their working years.
Yet probe them more deeply about their retirement dreams, and most boomers admit that they are terrified that neither they nor their government is saving enough.
Some two-thirds confess that they've never even calculated how much they need to save for retirement.
And an amazing 86% of boomers acknowledge that, quote, future retirees will face a personal financial crisis 20 years from now.
Yet at the same time, they do not expect or even want much from the government.
Nearly 9 out of 10 boomers agree that, quote, the government has made financial promises to their generation that it will not be able to keep.
90% agree with that.
For every boomer who says the government should shoulder the main responsibility for providing retirement income, five say that individuals should.
They will very likely get their wish.
From all the numbers we have seen, it is obvious that government retirement benefits, mainly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are likely to be severely reduced by the time most boomers retire.
there.
According to the recent Federal Reserve Board, 43% of U.S. families spent more than their income.
Only 30% accumulated assets for long-term saving.
In 1990, according to a Merrill Lynch analysis of Census Bureau data, Half of all families had less than $1,000 in net financial assets, a figure that had not risen over the previous decade, even in nominal dollars.
Half of all families had less than $1,000.
Among adults in their late 50s, the age at which workers are staring directly at retirement, median savings are still shy of $10,000.
B. Douglas Bernheim of Stanford University concludes that boomers on average must triple their current saving if they want to enjoy an undiminished living standard in retirement.
And if one assumes a 35% reduction in social security benefits, which seems more than likely, if not inevitable, then boomers will have to quintuple their saving five times.
If it's true that the promise of late-in-life government benefits helped to suppress private savings in the past, Maybe the growing expectation of cuts in government benefits will help to boost private savings in the future.
Right, so just to jump out of the article, so 9 out of 10 boomers totally get that there's not going to be any money for them, or very little, when they retire.
This was all known in the past.
So, did they save more based on that knowledge?
We'll see. Though economic theorists debate the point, people do take government subsidies into account when deciding how much to save.
By 13 to 1, households say that they would save more if they knew that future Social Security benefits were going to be cut.
No matter how, so remember I was talking about demand, not supply, as the root cause of political corruption.
No matter how clearly social security actuaries tell us that financial trouble looms ahead, politicians on both sides of the aisle are convinced that middle-class entitlement programs constitute the third rail of American politics.
Touch it and you're toast.
This was written in May 1996.
1996. 15 years ago.
Which says to me, I mean, everybody knew.
Boomers can't claim that they didn't know.
This is a big, wide survey.
Now, I don't know what is the case in Europe, but pretty much the same.
You either knew or you avoided knowing.
Either way, your responsible ignorance of the law, I was always told, was no excuse.
And so this is the great challenge that is faced in the current fiscal challenges of funding the retirement.
I was always told as a kid that I was responsible.
For my own mistakes. That I was responsible for the effects of my actions.
That if I blew my money on candy I couldn't expect to buy a book.
That if I blew my money on books, I couldn't expect to buy candy.
That if I spent more than I had, I was responsible for paying it back.
And this is something that I was taught.
This is something that when I had my first bank account at the age of 13, I actually had my first job at the age of 11, my first bank account at the age of 12.
If I borrowed more, I was dinged for it.
If I didn't have enough to pay...
The newspaper whose papers I was delivering on my roots, then I was indebted and I had to pay.
If I borrowed more than I had, then I had to pay it back.
I mean, this is something that was inflicted with universal social approval on a 12-year-old kid.
And even younger, I mean, I remember when I was in boarding school, At the age of six, we went to a fair, and I wanted five pennies to throw a ball at a coconut to win a toy.
I wanted that. And I had a certain amount of allowance that I could draw on, and I drew on it.
And I threw, and I missed, and I didn't get my five pennies back.
That was just gone.
Nobody said, oh, well, you gave it a shot, and you missed, and you made a mistake, and here's your five pennies back, and here's ten more.
And so, for me, and it was all boomers who were inflicting these rules on me, and I don't mind those rules.
I mean, I think they're actually good rules.
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