Measuring the Me Generation

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

Stephen Marche has written a thought-provoking piece about what he terms the “war against youth.” Although a bit whiny at times and sprinkled with class-envy rhetoric—he warns of “flowers of rage,” derides “virulently purified capitalism” and writes approvingly about “the protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year”—the thrust of the essay highlights the selfishness of the Baby Boomer generation and the consequences of that selfishness.

Here are a few of the consequences that Marche identifies: Pointing to the “economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in,” he argues that “There is a young America and there is an old America…One takes from the other.” He cites a 2009 Brookings Institution study to support his case: “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children.”

 

Thanks to what he calls “30 years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young,” he notes that “in 1984, American breadwinners who were 65 and over made ten times as much as those under 35. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost 47 times as much as the younger generation.”

Maintaining a political-economic system that serves “the comfort and largesse of the old” helps explain the untouchable nature of the tax-guzzling Social Security and Medicare programs. Marche notes that the Social Security system will run out of funds in 2036, “so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age 90.” Indeed, he makes a compelling case that “the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers. Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way.”

In other words, the Boomers will likely eat through the safety net their parents handed down to them. Yet many Boomers loudly oppose reforms to the system that could extend its life. A PBS report found that simply raising the Social Security retirement age to 71 by 2040, and to 75 by 2070, would save enough money to cover the looming shortfalls. Likewise, to preserve the system for future generations, Medicare needs to be reined in, means-tested and trimmed down; some elements of Medicare need to be phased out altogether.