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Thursday, November 17, 2011

"You're spoiled!" "No, YOU'RE spoiled!"
Posted by Jill | 7:36 AM
Yesterday on the shuttle to Newark Airport, I was talking with a woman who is a realtor in New Jersey. She was talking about how ill-prepared her young grandhcildren are to face an austere world. She had raised her children alone in a three-room apartment before finally being able to buy a house. I know she gets Medicare, so she is at least sixty-five. That makes her a baby boomer parent. Her children always worked -- at household chores, paper routes, lawn-mowing. They grew up and had children, and her grandchildren have always received anything they wanted, because their parents -- those children of a baby boomer mother -- wanted their children to have everything they didn't have. Her teenaged grandson has a brand new car, its lease paid for by his parents.

It's not unusual these days to see things like this. I used to work with a guy around my age (baby boom generation) who drove a Ford Taurus with a cracked winshield across the Tappan Zee Bridge every day while his high school age daughter drove a brand new car given to her by her World War II-generation grandparents. Another person I know drives her high school age daughter two blocks to school every day and was horrified when the local Dunkin' Donuts closed because "Where are the kids going to get their coffee?"

We are now seeing representatives of the McMansion generation -- kids who grew up in 4000-square-foot houses, each with his/her own bathroom. As much as I adore little Rachel Crow on X Factor, no, a girl does NOT need her own bathroom. But that's what parents, not all of them baby boomers, have done to their children in the name of "giving them what we didn't have."

Young people are seeing the current budget wars as a war on them -- their own future Social Security benefits at risk because of what they see as a generation that grew up in plenty and privilege. But just as there are kids today who DIDN'T grow up in McMansions and have strong work ethic (one that I know heads up a household of two sisters, a brother, and a nephew), not everyone born between 1946 and 1964 spends their days navel-gazing and collecting Social Security checks that they now want to deny others. Because I'll tell you this much: The teabaggers in their hoverounds were not out there in the streets in Chicago in 1968; they were the YAF crowd in plaid pants and Izod shirts with "Nixon's the One" stickers on their notebooks.

The navel-gazing stereotype is an image perpetuated by the media, and by all too many early baby boomers themselves, who look back with nostalgia at their own youth. But what younger people don't understand is that we did this ourselves, with our parents as they looked back on their youth. My late father-in-law felt that his days in the Army were the best time of his life. And this was someone who fought at the Battle of the Bulge. He believed that Glenn Miller was the greatest musician that ever lived and that every piece of music put out since the Big Band era was crap. Every generation does this, and today's young people will too when it's their turn.

Digby wrote about this the other day, citing an exchange that Rick Perlstein had in a live chat not all that long ago. It's worth clicking over and reading, if only for Rick Perlsteins statistics on just how LITTLE the pop culture and media images of the baby boom generation reflect reality. Generations are as heterogenous as any other group, and it's interesting to watch supposedly progressive people being willing to stereotype an entire group -- the generation born in 1946 and 1964 -- as being all exactly the same, and being so blind to reality:
But the fact is that "generations" don't do things and it's facile to look at the world in those terms. Indeed, in the case of the "millenial" vs the "boomers" it's downright self-defeating. The "boomers" who are failing to "make the hard choices" are actually saving their grandkids from the twisted logic of Pete Peterson who is using generational warfare to agitate for the "millenials" to defy their parents by ... cutting their own retirement benefits. After all, Peterson's not talking about cutting off grandma. He's talking about cutting off grandma's favorite grandson. And grandma is the one fighting to stop it.

Look, there's no denying that there are a lot of us. Some provisions were made in the early 1980s to recognize and deal with it. But of course governments of both parties found that piggybank to be very tempting, and now Republicans see the Social Security as the only creditor that the US can tell to fuck off, we're not paying.

When we fight to keep Social Security, we're not just doing it for us. We're doing it because we haven't really changed all that much after all. We still see ourselves as part of a larger community (ZOMG, socialism!!) and we recognize that part of that community is the many generations that will follow us.

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Saturday, June 04, 2011

Can we please stop saying that Medicare won't change for anyone 55 and over?
Posted by Jill | 8:40 AM
The Republican meme on Medicare seems to be that the Ryan plan won't eliminate Medicare because no one CURRENTLY IN THE PROGRAM will be affected. Of course, if you are NOT currently on Medicare, then all bets are off. "But the Ryan plan keeps everyone over 55 on the current program!", you might say, or might have heard. But here's the problem: Do you honestly think that Gen-X voters are going to allow the current Medicare program to stay intact when the late-year boomers and themselves will not be able to obtain benefits? As I've written before, I have FRIENDS who are Gen-Xers who blame us for everything, and it's only a short path from "All boomers voted for Reagan" to "Why should you get something I don't" to "Why don't you all just fucking die already?"

It's only a matter of time.

The evil genius of the Ryan plan is that it gets those pesky elderly voters -- those currently in the existing program -- off their backs and hopefully away from the polls in the immediate future, under the assumption that "greedy geezers" won't care about whether their children and grandchildren are able to rely on obtaining medical care in their old age. It remains to be seen whether this is a valid assumption, but 57% of those polled in a recent Kaiser Health survey favor keeping Medicare as a guaranteed plan.

What we don't know is how that number would be affected if people understood that the "vouchers" in the Ryan plan would cover less than 1/3 of the cost of the average health insurance plan, that their value would NEVER be increased, and that the Ryan plan contains NO requirement that insurance companies from which the elderly would now be trying to buy policies "take all comers." Because the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that is also part of the Republican agenda, current safeguards against cherry-picking would disappear, meaning that the nation's elderly would now receive vouchers that don't cover anywhere near the cost of premiums, let alone care itself, to buy insurance from private for-profit companies that don't want CHILDREN with health problems, let alone the elderly.

The Ryan plan is relying on "I Got Mine And Fuck You" for support. The question is whether voters are going to take their attention away from Anthony Weiner's penis long enough to understand how Paul Ryan essentially wants the nation's citizens, once they become elderly, to do as former Rep. Alan Grayson so succinctly put the Republican health care plan, "die quickly."

And if you think you are off the hook because you are 55, remember: Gen-X is right behind us, and all to many of that cohort would be perfectly happy to have us dead NOW.

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Monday, May 25, 2009

Why stop here? Why not just line us all up when we turn 62 and shoot us?
Posted by Jill | 7:24 AM
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)

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Monday, April 13, 2009

About all those baby boomers living on easy street...
Posted by Jill | 5:09 AM
I know that there are many people in their twenties and thirties who wish we would all just die already. But the fact of the matter is that those of us who are part of the post-WWII baby boom who were born after 1950 really are too old to rock 'n' roll and too young to die -- or to retire, for that matter. And when we're laid off in this recession, it takes most of us a lot longer to find a job, and the job-hunting process is even more humiliating than it is for younger workers.

When I was laid off last summer, I was one of five people laid off, all over the age of 40, four out of five of which were over 50. It was quite simply a question of jettisoning higher compensation, since all but two of those who remained are also over 50. I was also phenomenally lucky to have even marginal experience in the quirky hybrid of IT and clinical research in which I am now working and to be out of work at exactly the same time as a company here in New Jersey was building a staff. But the fact remains that I had well over a dozen interviews for Web site development/management jobs, all of them with people far younger than I am, not one of which went anywhere no matter how well the interview went. I'm lucky, especially since I put my college graduation date back on my resume during that job hunt, deciding that if a company was going to rule me out because of my age anyway, I wasn't about to waste my time talking to them.

I first ran into the age issue during an interview for a Web development job at a television network in 1999, when I was a mere whippersnapper of 45. The HR interview was going along swimmingly, with the recruiter grinning and friendly, until the "chat" started to turn to cultural references and questions that only someone over 40 would readily get. Once I was able to explain what a slide rule was, his demeanor changed and even though I was sent on to the Web managers, I knew the interview was already over -- a suspicion confirmed when on the way out the door I was told that I wasn't a "good fit" for the position.

Until this recession, many over-40 workers who found themselves out of work and unable to get past the 25-year-old HR reps asking then where they want to be in five years (I answered this question in my interview at my current job as "alive, healthy, and employed") either got real estate licenses or started small service businesses as pet sitters or personal chefs or errand runners. But with real estate in the crapper, and fewer people able to afford extra help even if they are still working, it's getting even more difficult for the over-50 set to rebound after a layoff:
Assessing just how pervasive age discrimination is in the job market is difficult. Certainly, older workers believe that it is rampant — an AARP survey in 2007 of workers ages 45 to 74 found that 60 percent said they had seen or experienced age bias.

Joanna N. Lahey, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, conducted a study published in 2005 in which she sent out 4,000 résumés on behalf of hypothetical job-seeking women ranging in age from 35 to 62 for entry-level jobs at companies in Boston and St. Petersburg, Fla. She changed only the applicant’s high school graduation year, an age indicator. Dr. Lahey found that workers under 50 were more than 40 percent more likely to be called for an interview.

Older workers often accumulate knowledge specific to their companies that helps protect them from layoffs, Dr. Lahey said. But that background is often less useful to other employers.

Older workers must also battle stereotypes about their energy and adaptability, as well as the reality that their health care costs are higher.

The oldest baby boomers have already begun retiring. But with retirement accounts plunging in value, more older workers than ever are trying to stay in the work force. And some unemployed boomers, frustrated after months of fruitless searching, have concluded that their only option is to turn their backs on successful careers and start over at much lower pay.

[snip]

Jonathan Steinberg, 53, a former marketing executive, has been out of work for more than two years. With a résumé that includes an undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.B.A. from New York University, he had a career on a steady upward progression. His most recent position was senior vice president for communications and marketing at a large organization for the care of the elderly, where he was paid about $170,000 a year.

But after applying for more than 100 jobs and getting few responses, he is now exploring work as a paralegal or a teacher. He believes that his age and experience make for slim odds of landing even a junior-level marketing position at this point.

“I’ve got one to send to college next year, with two more behind her,” Mr. Steinberg said of his children. “I can’t continue to wait for good news on the old job front.”

I don't know where I'd be if I hadn't received the offer for my current job, or what I'd do if, say, we were acquired and I was one of those jettisoned. We would be in better shape than many of our peers because we live frugally and have savings -- and no children to feed and clothe or put through college. But we still have ten years left on even our modest mortgage (no equity loans), and property taxes go up $500 every year, and while we can probably get 100,000 miles out of each of our two compact cars, we are already over 50,000 miles on each of them. And if you eat up your savings before "retirement", what then? Sell your house? To whom? And where do you live then? And once your equity is gone on month-to-month expenses, what then?

It's astounding how quickly we turn around and find ourselves on the shady side of 50. If there was ever a generation that believed it would never happen to us, it's the one I was born into. And of course for those who burnt themselves out in their 20's and died, it didn't. But unless you die in your 30's or early 40's, it DOES happen to you. I managed to be laid off before everything went completely to hell and rebound quickly. There are no guarantees that, when today's younger workers are where I am now, it won't look exactly like it does today.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

WDS
Posted by Jill | 6:37 AM
I'm not going to dare violate the copyright of He Who Must Not be Named on the full expression abbreviated in the acronym above, but the fact remains that there's not a whole lot I can add to this, except to say that when we fight to preserve Social Security, we're doing it for you too.

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Sunday, February 03, 2008

Throw a couple more older people in this and you've got a damn near perfect campaign video
Posted by Jill | 7:35 AM




This is really, really good. And I know that the people most energized by Barack Obama's candidacy are the young. But historically, young voters, largely because they're more mobile and sometimes less likely to register, don't always show up at the polls at crunch time. Hopefully this year will be different, assuming Barack Obama can pull this out and become the Democratic nominee.

But it isn't just young people who feel a responsibility to the future. I realize that everyone under 35 wishes that all the baby boomers would just put guns to our heads and die already -- preferably all at once because it would make great television. But you know what, guys? You need us to do this. And this isn't about baby-boomer self-centeredness, you even need our parents to help you do this. You need older Americans because there are still people out there who may not identify themselves as racist but won't vote for a black man because they're afraid of "what the blacks might do if one of theirs gains power." You need us because 51% or 52% or even 55% of the vote isn't going to be enough to stop them from shorting the number of voting machines sent to minority districts. You need us because the media are going to start up the Bash the Democratic Candidate chorus that's going to start up again as soon as we have a nominee running against Saint John McCain, the philanderer, Keating Five veteran, and kisser-up to a man who won by smearing his adopted child. It isn't going to stop an already right-wing Supreme Court from handing another close election to a Republican. It isn't going to stop Republican Secretaries of State from making bogus claims of terrorist threats to shut down transparency in the handling of the votes.

We've been down this road many, many times. And while a lot of us have become cynical about the process, we know that we have no choice but to continue to play the game. Jack Shepherd on Lost is often a sanctimonious pain in the ass, but he's right -- we live together or die alone.

In this video, I see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Herbie Hancock -- and that's about the extent of representation from older Americans that I see. And as I said, this isn't about baby boomers. How cool would a video like this be if it included people like Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn? I know you want to think that the WWII generation has all died off, that those born between 1955 and 1964 (of which Obama is one, by the way) all monolithic, that we all sold out and became conservative Republicans and voted for George W. Bush. Or you think that the Triangulation of Hillary is representative of an entire generation in our lust for power, forgetting that Hillary was a conservative Young Republican long before she married Bill.

When I worked on Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, and I went to Meetup meetings to hand-write personal letters to Iowa voters, the average of people who were there was probably around 50 -- and about half were older than I was. We're out here. You need us to do this. And if you shut us out, even symbolically, such as in videos like this one, you're not going to have the kind of decisive numbers to keep the Republicans from stealing another one -- and going to find yourself with President John McCain in November.

Let us help do this. Together we can stop the madness.

Yes. We. Can.

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