As my friends are seeing their children start to go off to college, I become more and more glad that I never had any. What these people are going through trying to figure out how to pay for college for these kids so they don't come out with a six-figure mortgage hanging over their heads and no jobs is just heartbreaking. Mr. Brilliant and I are lucky in that we've been able to put money away for the years after we've both been dumped from the workforce for being too old. I dare not even call it retirement, since that implies something voluntary; a sigh of relief and a kick-back and enjoy whatever healthy years we have left kindof image. It's nowhere near enough; after all, I didn't sell out to corporate America until I was well into my thirties and Mr. Brilliant is in a field (desktop support and network administration) that is now more than ever seen as solely a cost center, the employees of which are to be paid peanuts. Actually, I should say he WAS in a field (and hopes to be again), having been jettisoned back in January in favor of a 25-year-old replacement.

We are over the threshold of the Ryan plan cutoff, so in theory we would just make it into the current Medicare plan. However, if you are 55 or older and think you can exhale, just think about the Gen-Xers and millenials who are going to be running the government over the next thirty years. Do you honestly believe these people are going to let us keep this plan that they and their peers and children were denied by the 2011 Republicans? Hardly. Either Medicare will be eliminated by them or we will. Hell, I have FRIENDS who are Gen-Xers who blame us for everything and wish we would just fuck off and die already.

So whether you are 54 or 56, ultimately we are all going to end up in the same leaky canoe, trying to steer it past the Koch bros. yacht. And here's what we have to do in order to be able to have a roof over our heads when we're older:

A 54-year-old today will have to save an additional $182,000 in their IRA or 401(k) before he or she retires just to pay for the House Republican plan to eliminate Medicare, an analysis released today by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) found.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that individuals born in 1957 would need $182,000 by the time they retire at 65 to pay the additional costs imposed by the Republican plan if they live to 84. The analysis was included in a letter to Rep. Miller.

“Under the Republican plan, seniors will go into debt. They will be forced to sell their homes that they spent a lifetime paying off. And they will have to rely on their children just to pay for basic medical care,” said Miller. “This is not what anyone would envision as a dignified retirement.”

Last month, House Republicans voted to end the Medicare program, which offers guaranteed benefits, and replace it with a plan that would force seniors to find private insurance with the assistance of a voucher. Since the voucher’s value relative to health care costs would decrease over time and private insurance costs are higher than traditional Medicare, seniors retiring in 2022 under the Republican plan would be forced to pay much higher costs than under current law.

As a result, CEPR found that the average senior beginning in 2022 would have to save $182,000 to cover these additional costs, assuming a return of 3 percent in real interest during their retirement years.

I know any number of people, not just in my own household (including many of our readers) who are past fifty, out of work, and despairing of ever working again. How the hell are they supposed to save another $182,000?

Perhaps Mr. Ryan would like to answer that question.

Labels: baby boomers, economic death watch, We Are So Screwed

Stan Freberg and Ray Bradbury (yes, THAT Ray Bradbury) hawking Sunsweet Pitted Prunes:


And now, an extra-special treat; something I've been looking for on YouTube forever and IT'S FINALLY HERE!! Mom, this one's for you:

This is the infamous "Lemon Cream Pie" sketch from Great American Dream Machine. If you're a member of the Most Hated Generation, your mom probably bought those Banquet cream pies. Mine did, and I grew up in a house where cookies meant vanilla wafers and we dreamt of Twinkies because we weren't allowed to have them. After this sketch ran on TV, you could pick up these pies at the Finast for a quarter because no one wanted them anymore.

Labels: baby boomers, pop culture

Or better yet, take a tip from the Nazis and build gas chambers. Then round up anyone born between 1946 and, say, 1960 (because after all, we don't want to have to deal with pesky things like Keith Olbermann being born in 1959, or President Obama being born in 1961, or Jon Stewart being born in 1961, or Stephen Colbert being born in 1964 -- the "official" end of the baby boom.

Perhaps that would make people like Robert Samuelson happy:

It's increasingly obvious that Congress and the president (regardless of which party is in power) will deal with the political stink bomb of an aging society only if forced. And the most plausible means of compulsion would be for Social Security and Medicare to go bankrupt: trust funds run dry; promised benefits exceed dedicated payroll taxes. The sooner this happens, the better.

That the programs will ultimately go bankrupt is clear from the trustees' reports. On pages 201 and 202 of the Medicare report, you will find the conclusive arithmetic: over the next 75 years, Social Security and Medicare will cost an estimated $103.2 trillion, while dedicated taxes and premiums will total only $57.4 trillion. The gap is $45.8 trillion. (All figures are expressed in "present value," a fancy term for "today's dollars.")

The Medicare actuaries then dryly note what would happen once the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare's hospital insurance program are depleted: "No provision exists under current law to address the projected [Medicare] and [Social Security] financial imbalances. Once assets are exhausted, expenditures cannot be made except to the extent covered by ongoing tax receipts." Translation: benefits would fall. Social Security checks would shrink; some Medicare bills wouldn't be paid in full—and the shortfalls would progressively worsen. Retirees would scream. Hospitals might shut. No president or Congress would abide the outcry; even the threat of imminent bankruptcy would rouse them to action. But restoring the programs' solvency would confront Congress and the White House with fundamental questions.

In 1940, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 61.4 years for men, 65.7 for women; by 2008, the comparable figures were 75.4 and 80. So, as health and longevity improve, when should people stop working and be entitled (from which comes the noun "entitlement") to receive government retirement subsidies? Stripped of popular euphemisms ("social insurance," "entitlements"), that's what Social Security and Medicare mainly are. If that's so, how much should wealthier retirees be subsidized?

Or: how much should obligations to the old displace other national needs—for, say, defense, education, research, housing, transportation or adequate family incomes? In 1990, Medicare and Social Security represented 28 percent of federal spending; in 2019, their share will be almost 40 percent, projects the Obama administration. As this spending grows, pressures to raise taxes, increase budget deficits or cut other programs intensify. What's the right balance between the past and the future?

Indeed. So why not just set a mandate that all baby boomers must be exterminated? The only question is at what age they should round us all up. 50? 55? 62, the earliest age at which one can collect Social Security? After all, aren't we hogging all the jobs? And aren't we going to hog all the money?

People like Robert Samuelson, and like Pete Peterson -- the main voice of the Kill Social Security Now movement and someone who is never for one minute going to have to worry about what he's going to live on when he's old, present the Social Security dilemma as if it's always been there and absolutely nothing has been done to anticipate the elephant being digested by a snake that is the baby boom generation. In fact, the Social Security reforms of 1983 were designed to front-load the system to insure its solvency as this huge influx of aging people entered the system in the new millennium. The problem is that governments both Republican and Democratic couldn't leave this nice fat chunk o'money alone, and raided the fund for various purposes, primarily tax cuts for the wealthy and wars. What's sitting in there now is a bunch of IOUs, which as we now see, aren't worth the paper on which they're printed.

In the early 1980's, Ronald Reagan, the smiling benign patriarch of the Republican Party, told Americans that you could cut taxes, increase spending, and balance the budget. This started us on the road towards the "You can have whatever you want and it's all free through the magic hand of the markets" mentality that has dominated American economic discourse for nearly three decades. It's the mentality that fueled the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and the orgy of credit card spending that has had obsessed Americans relentlessly pursuing bigger, better, higher, taller, more luxurious consumer goods, and it's what has brought us to where we are now.

But the reality is that we are ALL affected by the collapse of the American economy. And frankly, the only people who have a leg to stand on in bashing prior generations are those currently in their teens and early twenties, because they had no opportunity to try and mitigate the profligacy of the largely Republican rule of the last thirty years. For Gen-X to bash the boomers makes no sense, because they too worked on Wall Street in the 1980's and wore expensive suits and worked for Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980's.

But unless we're prepared to either see upwards of twenty million people (allowing for early deaths) living on the streets, or round us all up for mass extermination, we'd better face up to the fact that most of us working today, and indeed most baby boomers, have paid into that system at the higher post-1983 level. And that a clearheaded assessment of just what the future prospects of said system are, without the agendas of those who represent the interests of the wealthiest americans, is going to require a multigenerational effort.

Or you can just elect the guy who wants mass extermination. You know there'll be one.

(h/t)

Labels: baby boomers, generational conflict, rant, retirement savings, snark, Social Security

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with younger people from Gen-X to Millennials who insist that baby boomers had all the good drugs and all the good sex and then became greedy scumbag Reagan Republicans by 1980. I know that's a nice, convenient thing to believe, sort of like the notion that Barack Obama will "give the blacks all the power in the country" and "illegal immigrants are using up all the health care", but it's just not true, as a survey conducted for TVLand reveals:

Fifty percent of American adults age 40-59 – The Baby Boomers – feel that the government is doing too much to solve Wall Street’s problems, according to a new poll by TV Land. Twenty-five percent feel that the government is not doing enough about the Wall Street crisis and 25% don’t know if there should be more or less government involvement. This is just one of the findings in a new poll conducted by OTX on behalf of TV Land, a division of Viacom Inc.'s (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B) MTV Networks, as part of TV Land’s overall commitment to superserve this 40- and 50-something demographic.

The TV Land poll also shows 94% of Boomers – the country’s largest generation – plan to go to the polls next month, with 82% of those polled saying they are extremely likely to vote. The impact of this finding is enormous as this generation had the highest turnout of voters in the 2004 Presidential election. Obama voters are more determined to make their voices heard as 89% of his supporters say they are extremely likely to vote compared to 82% of McCain supporters and 58% of undecideds. The survey also shows that regardless of whom they are voting for, the majority of people in this demographic (54%) believe that Barack Obama will win the 2008 Presidential election this November. Twenty-five percent believe John McCain will win and 20% are unsure of the outcome of the November vote. The poll also found that if the election were held today, the country’s largest generation would elect Barack Obama to office capturing 48% of the vote. John McCain would get 40% of the Boomer vote and 12% of Boomers are either unsure or voting for someone else.

...

Although the candidates declined to criticize the readiness of their opposing Vice Presidential candidates in last night’s Presidential debate, when asked about the Vice President candidates, nearly two-thirds of people in their 40s and 50s (64%) say Joe Biden is prepared for the job of Vice President of the United States. Thirty-four percent feel Palin is prepared. Contrastingly, Sarah Palin is seen by 47% of the demo as not prepared for the job versus the 13% who think Biden isn’t prepared. The majority of Boomers (51%) say that Biden helped Obama’s chances of being elected and 45% say Palin helped McCain. Nearly one-fifth (18%) say Biden hurt Obama’s chances, while 34% say Palin hurt MCain.

While both candidates have a “change” platform, 48% of Boomer voters find Barack Obama more believable when he talks about “change” while 21% say John McCain is more believable. Nine percent say both candidates are believable when they talk about “change” and 18% say neither candidate. Only 4% of this generation doesn’t know which candidate is more believable. Nearly nine in ten Boomer voters (86%) say that things in this country are heading on the wrong track. Among Barack Obama supporters, that number jumps to 92% who say the country is on the wrong track. Twenty-three percent of McCain supporters say the country is on the right track, compared to only 8% of Obama supporters.

I would say that this distribution, with about half of baby boomers leaning left, slightly less leaning right, and the rest either inattentive or unsure, is probably representative of the way it's always been. The Greg Marmalards never got the press that the counterculture kids got, but they were always there. It's just that their Izod Lacoste shirts and plaid pants weren't as interesting to the media as a bunch of kids dancing around naked.

Labels: baby boomers, voters

For those of us who are not tall, slim, and leggy, finding clothes has always been a challenge. Whether it's having to cut ten inches off of every skirt because we're short, or having to take tucks in the waist of our jeans because to get them to fit through the hips means they're too big in the waist, or finding V-necks to wear to work that don't expose cleavage, it's a never-ending battle. And when you get older it's even worse. Once you get north of the big five-oh, less is more. Little gathered sleeves are out. Little floral prints look ridiculous. It's no accident that so many of us end up in long tunics and leggings, or "float" dresses, or some other fabric nightmare.

It's no wonder I hate shopping and do all my clothes shopping exclusively through catalogs. When I recently decided it was time to get out of the tunics-and-leggings and into some decent clothes, I found that there were three catalogs where I could always rely on finding reasonably-priced clothes that fit: Woman Within, most of whose stuff is crap, but which has nice pants and jeans for larger sizes that also have a 27-inch inseam; Coldwater Creek, where occasionally something is in their clearance section that I could wear, and J. Jill, which lures in repeat shoppers with e-mails offering good discounts and real bargains in their sale and clearance section.

Coldwater Creek, J. Jill, and other stores like them, use a very simple approach: less is more. Give the customer simple lines, good quality at a good price, a wide range of sizes for all body types, and interesting, rich colors, and you'll have a loyal customer.

It seems, though, that the coveted 18 to 30 demographic isn't interested in these clothes, and today the New York Times profiles the fate of Sigrid Olsen, a higher-end designer of this type of clothing for the too-old-for-Abercrombie crowd, in the context of the struggles of the very emporia where I shop:

THE call came late at night on the first Monday of January, delivering the news that Sigrid Olsen had feared for six months. Liz Claiborne Inc., after a review of its brands, was dismantling her 24-year-old fashion business, closing its 54 stores and laying off dozens of employees, including the designer herself.

Ms. Olsen, who spends much of the year at her longtime home here, began to call her staff in New York to explain what was happening in advance of a corporate announcement that would be made the next day. But what she could not explain was what had led to the demise of a peppy brand with a passionate customer base and peak sales of about $100 million, or why the sputtering Liz Claiborne conglomerate, which had entertained offers for Ms. Olsen’s label and others, had not chosen just to sell it.

“I thought that we were one of the brands they would want to keep and nurture,” Ms. Olsen said. “That was more shocking than anything.”

It is a curious development in the fickle business of fashion that clothing labels like Ms. Olsen’s, made by and for the baby boomer generation, are among those being hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail retrenchment. The restructuring of Liz Claiborne early this year also resulted in upheavals at more expensive labels: Ellen Tracy, which was sold; and Dana Buchman, which was pulled from department stores and will be remade more moderately for Kohl’s. At the same time, retailers like Ann Taylor, Talbots and J. Jill have been closing hundreds of stores around the country, and the consolidation of department stores over the last decade has left many malls with more vacancies than options for the enormous demographic of women in their 40s to 60s.

What does it say when empty storefronts in malls are preferable to shops that don't cater to the kinds of teens and twentysomethings that AREN'T seen at Obama rallies? The cruel irony, for both the Juicy Couture set and for those of us buying raisin-colored twinsets at J. Jill, is that because of the collapsing economy, the teens don't have the disposable income , and while at least some boomers have managed to hold onto their jobs and have the income, there are fewer outlets for them to spend it.

This should be a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks YOUR generation will somehow be different; that you will escape getting old; that you won't start to hear comments your mother used to make coming out of your own mouth; that you'll want to wear Kate Spade your entire life. Because if there was ever a generation that never thought it would happen to us, it's mine. And look at where we are.

Labels: baby boomers, pop culture

Last month I had an extended and rather heated exchange with one of our commenters who made a host of sweeping generalizations about baby boomers, few if any of which were true. I've had conversations with some of my Gen-X friends on this as well, with many of them similarly blaming the baby boomers for their own plight. I've even seen Gen-Xers trying to claim Keith Olbermann as one of their own, even though he was born in 1959 and therefore is indisputably a baby boomer. I hate to tell them this, but no less a Gen-X icon than old Lloyd Dobler himself, John Cusack, only escaped the dread Baby Boomer label by a mere six months.

I'm seeing a lot of this lately; blaming the baby boomers for everything that's gone wrong in this country, hand-in-hand with the idea that Gen-X, Gen-Y, and the Millenials are somehow either a) hapless victims of the evil boomers (largely the province of Gen-Xers who are now reaching an age when the refusal to "sell out" is starting to have the nasty consequences of no savings and no health insurance); b) greedy, evil people who have sucked up all the resources and left nothing for anyone else; or c) an entire generation of hippies who had all the sex and all the drugs and all the fun and then became Republicans and tried to deny anyone else the fun they had.

Over at Americablog, the primary culprit is "Chris in Paris", who yesterday posted yet another of his screeds contrasting the evil, venal baby boomers with the pure, altruistic millennials:

For years we all heard about the staggering retirement costs related to the Boomers but in the last year we hear much more about the work attitudes of the Boomers compared to the younger workers. The UK, probably like the US, is facing a problem with a substantial percentage of school principals heading into retirement. That alone is not necessarily a problem, but the younger generations are showing little interest in taking on the stresses/risks of management. They would just assume make a little bit less money and enjoy time with friends and family.

All of this is connected and surely is a reaction to what many of us saw growing up. How many kids under 30 (and younger than the Boomers) saw parents lose all job security? How many saw parents/family pursue higher positions only to be tossed aside with the first sign of trouble. As much as Boomers like to argue that young kids are just lazy, I simply don't buy it. It's obvious to me that we are in a testing period where employers and employees are trying to figure out the dynamics of the future.

Maybe young workers will have to give a little (leaving home, for example) but I also think that they are forcing employers to update and adjust. More young workers want a clearer division between work and life and they are not going to be intertwined as we saw with the Boomers. This is a healthy change, in my opinion. It's a different world today and that means adjustments are necessary. If the best employers can offer is job insecurity, fewer benefits and pushing workers upwards to their own level of self-incompetence, something needs to give. More power to the youth who are forcing change. Just because the Boomers don't like it or it doesn't fit with their model of life, doesn't mean it's wrong.

The name "Dennis Hopper" always comes up in these conversations as being somehow emblematic of the baby boom generation even though with a birth year of 1936, he's only nine years younger than MY mother and is closer to the WWII generation than to the baby boom. I suppose this is due to those ghastly TV commercials he does for Ameriprise, which annoy even me. But just because someone played a rebel in Easy Rider, a movie that has come to be regarded as THE signature film of the 1960's doesn't make him a baby boomer. And even if he were, the fact is that those born between 1946 and 1964 are as polyglot as any generation before or after them.

There have always been rebels. John Reed and Louise Bryant and Gertrude Stein were radicals, and the bohemian monde was already thriving in Greenwich Village when the Titanic sank. The Beat Generation was already in or close to adulthood and beyond by the time WWII rolled around. William S. Burroughs was born in 1914, Jack Kerouac in 1922; and Allen Ginsberg in 1926. The unfortunate reality, if you look at the American Rebel in the 20th century, is that none of the rebel movements that arose have ever managed to make more than a dent in "the system."

I was born in 1955, which meant that I was in junior high and high school during most of what we think of as the 1960's upheaval. As such, I was too young for a lot of what went on, though there were people my age who ran away from home in their early teens and went to Haight-Ashbury and hung out with those who formed the San Francisco music scene. Many of those either never made it out alive or never really got their lives together afterwards, because teenage runaways rarely do. I went to the antiwar marches, and stuffed envelopes for progressive Democratic candidates, but there really isn't all that much you can do to Change the World when you're a high school student living with your parents.

I was raised by parents whom I've always believed really wanted to be beatniks. They were the kind of Adlai Stevenson liberal intellectuals you had in the late 1950's and early 1960's; cynics about the process who hated Nixon with a passion, read Jules Feiffer cartoons and The New Yorker and had major freakouts, though in different ways, when what we think of as "The Sixties" came around and my sister was just old enough to take part.

I graduated high school into the first of the 1970's oil shocks, and graduated college into another one. By that time, the left was all but dead; traumatized by the assassinations of 1968, the defeat of Eugene McCarthy for the 1968 nomination by the Vietnam-identified party choice Hubert Humphrey and the election of Richard Nixon, the re-election of Nixon in 1972 and Watergate. Vietnam finally ended, however ignominiously, and by 1977 we were too worried about double-digit inflation and getting up at four in the morning to be on the gas line by five to do much of anything by way of activism.

There's this notion Chris and others put forward that the 80-hour workweek is somehow the invention of sellout baby boomers out of pure greed for bigger houses and ever-more electronic gewgaws and STUFF. But the fact of the matter is that at least for people born my year and later, especially those of us on a white-collar track, the defined benefit pensions and job security that our parents enjoyed was already largely gone by the time we emerged from college into a recession caused by the second oil shock in a decade.

I remember a cartoon that made the rounds during the early 1980's. It was called "The Reading of the Will", and it depicted a bequest from the World War II generation to the baby boomers, such as taking all the prosperity and all the Social Security and all the pensions. So the idea that the previous generation stole all the goodies for itself and left nothing for the future isn't new.

During my high school and college years, I knew as many kinds of people as exist. There were the student council liberals in their plaid pants; the kind of guys who went on to run for office on the safest of Democratic platforms. There were the "love it or leave it" chickenhawks -- the guys who were gung-ho about the Vietnam War (though they were relieved when they drew a high draft number) and adored Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Those are the guys who spawned the likes of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. There were the hippie/politicos; the ones who organized school walkouts on Martin Luther King Day before it was a holiday and arranged large groups to participate in big antiwar marches in New York and Earth Day festivals in the local park. And then there were the drugs-and-music crowd, which I can't say much about because in my school, they tended to be part of the hippie/politico crowd.

I suspect that if you went to any high school today, you'd find the same basic groups, albeit distributed perhaps differently. And among my generation, the YAF chickenhawk crowd is still supporting war, albeit another pointless one, the liberals are largely still liberal, and many of those who did the whole hippie/drug thing are long dead or burnt out.

Are most corporate CEOs today baby boomers? Absolutely; but this is largely a function of age rather than a sign of a mass sellout by the baby boom generation. And many of the names most closely associated with corporate greed, like Dennis Hopper, pre-date or were born in the earliest years of the baby boom: former Exxon chief Lee Raymond (1938), Ken Lay (1942), just-fired Citigroup head Charles Prince (1950), jailed Tyco chief Dennis Kozlowski (1946). Other baby boom CEOs include Apple's Steve Jobs (1955); Microsoft's Bill Gates (1955), who may be loathsome for other reasons and preposterously wealthy, but is also putting a good chunk of his fortune into philanthropy; Echostar's Charlie Ergen (1953), who is a kind of folk hero among his customers; and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (both 1951).

The 80-hour workweek, this drive towards "productivity" that has us all spinning our wheels harder for less reward, found its footing during the Reagan years, when the doctrine of "trickle-down" economics had American workers behaving like the Little Engine that Could, working ever-longer hours with ever-less security, repeating "I think I can I think I can I think I can" while deluding themselves that if they just WORKED HARD ENOUGH, they'd get their piece of the Republican pie. And nothing that's happened in the meantime, no matter how much they've been screwed, has dissuaded many from this belief.

Another reason, other than sheer size, that the boomers are being blamed for everything is because of Bill Clinton, the baby boomer president who in his sexual laxity represented everything about the sixties that caused our parents' generation (and those boomers who still adhered to their parents' values) to freak out, and combined it with a nearly pathological desire to be liked and to "play nice with others." This need, combined with a ferocious political "pragmatism" brought us eight years of prosperity, but it also brought us NAFTA and other trade policy that led to the wave of outsourcing of American jobs that we see today. And now that president's wife, whom everyone forgets was a Goldwater Girl before Republicans turned her into Lady Macbeth by way of Janis Joplin by way of Angela Davis, is also running for that office.

Most of us have to sell out eventually. I thought I was refusing to sell out by working in book publishing, for all that the editor for whom I worked was the foremost publisher at the time of conservative screeds by the fathers of the neocon movement. But when I couldn't afford to get my car fixed, I "sold out" and worked for a financial information services company. Later I worked for a company that does business with the company that makes Hummers and now I work for a place that does mental health research, including drug research. I don't have to work 80 hours a week, and while I feel I'm compensated quite fairly, I'm not rich, nor would I be if I did work 80 hours a week. However, when your competition is willing to work 80 hours a week for peanuts, as is the case when jobs are outsourced overseas, taking a month off to go hang gliding in Macchu Picchu isn't going to be applauded by employers, no matter how much Chris in Paris thinks millennials are going to change the nature of the workplace. Far more likely is that millennials and the generation after them will find the screws being tightened even more so by employers.

No doubt it's the fate of every generation to be hated by the one that comes afterward, because unfortunately (as we have found out, much to our dismay and eternal embarrassment), rebels have been trying to change the world for the last century; and not even a large generational population is not going to be homogeneous enough to create any kind of real change all by itself.

Now if the Gen-Xers moaning about how they aren't going to see any Social Security (which by the way, we always knew to be true of us as well) and the progressive millennials thinking that they are going to be able to work 20 hours a week so they can go kite flying every night and still make enough to pay the rent and if they can't it's all the fault of their boomer managers, would recognize that there is greater power when generations get together in the common interest rather than their own parochial ones, perhaps we would have the numbers to make substantive changes. Because a lot of us have been out here trying for the past 30-40 years. We've had limited success at best, but we could sure use the help as we continue.

Of course that would require making an effort instead of complaining and scapegoating Baby Boomers as the source of all our problems the way Republicans have decided to scapegoat Mexicans.

Labels: baby boomers, Generation X, millenials

If social networking sites for boomers and seniors are the Next Big Thing on the Web, are they still refusing to hire anyone over 40 to build them?

Older people are sticky.

That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.

And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.

“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”

This prospective and relative stickiness is helping drive a wave of new investment into boomer and older-oriented social networking sites that offer like-minded (and like-aged) individuals discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chatter about diet, fitness and health care.

Last week, VantagePoint Ventures, an early investor in MySpace, announced that it had led a $16.5 million round of financing for Multiply, a social networking site aimed at people who are settled.

In August, Shasta Ventures led a $4.8 million financing round for TeeBeeDee, a site coming out of its test stage this month. The name is short for “To Be Determined” (as in: just because you’re not trolling for a mate on MySpace doesn’t mean your life is over.)

Also in August, Johnson & Johnson spent $10 million to $20 million to acquire Maya’s Mom, a social networking site for parents, according to a person briefed on the deal. The site has been in existence about a year.

Maya's Granny, call your lawyer.

Let's take a spin around who runs these sites.

Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Eons, says "If you’re under 50, join me in being an evangelist for Eons and challenge yourself to see how many friends and family you can inspire to live the biggest life possible. Be loud and be proud about your age." The video linked here shows that while the senior staff appears to be well-represented by those in the target demographic, the staff is disproportionately under 40. The company gives lip service to encouraging "Eons members (age 50+)" to apply, but with a technical staff that isn't representative of this ethos, Taylor might want to think about providing training in the skills the company uses so as to more actively recruit the site's target demographic.

This is Peter Pezaris, the founder of Multiply.com. Doesn't look like a boomer, does he? Bet he doesn't hire them to work on his site, either.

Jerry Cover of ReZoom looks like he might be approaching the target demographic for his site. But before you rush to sign up, you should probably know that he's a founder of Lighthouse Family Ministries -- something his bio at ReZoom doesn't mention. This is all well and good, but since "sharing the love of Christ" is part of what Lighthouse does, and the "About Us" page at ReZoom refers to "inspirational stories about ReZoomers just like you", expect a Christian focus.

TeeBeeDee's founder, Robin Wolaner, is 50 and the other founders are all 50-plus. TeeBeeDee's job page has the boilerplate nondiscrimination blurb, but says nothing about welcoming "experienced" applicants.

I know that Gen-X likes to put the responsibility for everything that's wrong with the world in the laps of baby boomers, but it's surprising that it's taken this long for social networking to hit the boomer community. With many of the bloggers that I met at Yearly Kos and with whom I've become acquainted since being around my age, and with the keep-up-with-the-youngsters boomer mentality, it's overdue that entrepreneurs realize that web sites targeted at this elephant going through a snake could be a good idea. It would be nice, however, if these sites made an effort to hire engineers, programmers, and writers in the age group of their target demographic. There are a lot of them out there, trying to cobble together an income doing what they can because corporate America just doesn't want them anymore.

Labels: baby boomers, Information technology