The great baby-boomer retirement wave is upon us. According to Census Bureau data, 44% of boomers are at retirement age and millions more are soon to join them. By 2030, the largest generation to enter retirement will all be older than 65.
The general assumption is that boomers will have a comfortable retirement. Coasting on their accumulated wealth from three decades as America’s dominant economic force, boomers will sail off into their golden years to sip on margaritas on cruises and luxuriate in their well-appointed homes. After all, Federal Reserve data shows that while the 56 million Americans over 65 make up just 17% of the population, they hold more than half of America’s wealth — $96.4 trillion.
But there’s a flaw in the narrative of a sunny boomer retirement: A lot of older Americans are not set up for their later years. Yes, many members of the generation are loaded, but many more are not. Like every age cohort, there’s significant wealth inequality among retirees — and it’s gotten worse in the past decade. Despite holding more than half of the nation’s wealth, many boomers don’t have enough money to cover the costs of long-term care, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022. That year, 30% of people over 65 were economically insecure, meaning they made less than $27,180 for a single person. And since younger boomers are less financially prepared for retirement than their older boomer siblings, the problem is bound to get worse.
As boomers continue to age out of the workforce, it’s going to put strain on the healthcare system, government programs, and the economy. That means more young people are going to be financially responsible for their parents, more government spending will be allocated to older folks, and economic growth could slow.
I get that it’s popular to blame an entire generation for the current troubles in the world, but the ones facing poverty after retirement aren’t the rich assholes who ransacked the economy and set everyone else after them up to fail. And, believe it or not, not every one of them votes for conservatives against their best interests. Show some empathy.
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Okay, fuck YOUR boomers then. I’m sorry you descend from such assholes. And while we’re at it, fuck the wealthy and super wealthy who don’t give their money to do good in the world. And okay let’s fuck those non-wealthy who wasted what money they earned on selfish shit.
But there’s a lot of old people who’ve never become wealthy because they were fair and kind and helpful to others instead. They still vote for government policies that benefit people worse off than they, and they make a good effort to embrace diversity, fight climate change, promote truth and science and peace. They didn’t die of COVID because they masked up and got the vaccines and rejected ivermectin. They may not be a majority but there’s still a lot because the whole is so large. They don’t deserve extra special treats but they don’t deserve to die homeless either.
This is my boomer MIL. She is honestly one of the kindest people I know. . She votes pro-environment/pro-social issues and has given (almost beyond her means) everything she can to virtually anyone who needs it. She has almost nothing left, and is a stones throw from couch surfing. I have no idea what’ll happen when her health starts to fail. As frustrated as I am with boomers, I try to remember her and the good she has tried to bring about in the world.
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So because some members of a group were unkind or showed you discourtesy, you condemn them all? I’d love to hear your thoughts on other ethnic groups. Anyone from India ever give you a hard time? I bet that makes you think less of all Indians. Y’know a lot of Russians support Putin and the war in Ukraine. Do you also think all Russians deserve to be punished as a result?
I hope you don’t consider yourself socially progressive because your attitude is part of the problem.
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While my boomer parents have obviously participated in the system and profited from it, they have never voted for a party that lead us down this path. Are they also to blame?
Ok so, meeting quite a few rude indians, over a time period is enough to write off like, a billion+ people?
The point is you aren’t capable of accounting anecdotal consensus for large populations, even if you think you’ve anecdotally met a lot of em
Bud what is your deal with trying to make it seem like people are racist against Indians specifically?
I’m not the other comment, I’m just extending the example.
It’s basic critical thinking to take one situation and compare it to another.
It could be any very large group, indians are a group of 1.4 billion and I found it applicable to extend the example. The point is anecdotal observation cannot ever form accurate assumption for a large group.
Same goes for boomers.
Bigger picture is eat the rich, don’t let them divide us. Age and generation isn’t the problem. It’s a side effect of the income gap. It doesn’t take a saint to empathize, it takes a human. If you spit the same shit back at them, you’re as bad as they are and the next generation will look at us the same way.
Income gap is and always has been the problem. Eat the rich.
Yo you’re boomers were legit insane dicks! I agree we should all hate on them and try to make their lives miserable!!
On the other hand, the boomers in my life seem well aware how difficult things are nowadays for us. I’m brown tho so ymmv
By a majority, the poorer demographic of boomers voted for them, though. That trend increased as they continued to age.
If we get their voting records and fund only the ones who voted with any empathy for their fellow humans, maybe we can talk.
On a tangent: While we are at it, let’s not allow healthcare for the ones that rejected science and vocally supported those who supported violence against healthcare workers. Maybe some consequences for the Me Generation for once?
Yup, even if you’re a poor retiring boomer you don’t deserve a social safety net if you spent your whole life committed to destroying it. Conservative boomers who are the large majority of boomers voted in the conservative assholes explicitly to gut the “new deal” that their parents put in place for them. “I got mine” was their motto, well now live in it.
You should get the retirement you voted for all your life. Show me your blue voting record and you can have a social safety net.
You’re telling the wrong generation to have empathy. Stop victim blaming. It’s disgusting.
You’re wrong. All but one state voted for Reagan the first time. This was absolutely a multi-generational thing.
He won all but one state. You do realize that doesn’t mean everyone in those states voted for him, right?
Nice attempt to redirect the conversation, but that didn’t work. Boomers as a rule voted for Reagan and his platform of hate. They voted for his made up “Welfare Queen”. They voted to get rid of pensions. They voted to get rid of unions. They did all these things because THEY didn’t think that THEY needed them anymore. An entire generation of narcissists ruined and continues to ruin the world.
You don’t have to believe me, but my boomer parents agree. To quote my Baby Boomer father, “Boomers destroyed the world”.
You really don’t understand how US elections work, do you?
In 1980, Reagan received only 50.8% of the popular vote yet won in 44 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election
In 1984, he received 58.8% and won 49 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election
If you look at the demographics of both elections, voters under 45 (i.e. the boomers at the time, since Gen X was too young to vote in '80 and the oldest were just turning 19 in '84) were much less likely to vote for Reagan.
But go on about how boomers voted for him “as a rule” even though about 40-50% voted against him, you absolute tool.
I’m convinced ageism (and to a lesser extent religious discrimination) is the last true bastion of bigotry. You’re not allowed to be homophobic, transphobic, or racist on the internet anymore. But if you call someone evil for the crime of being of voting age when Reagan got elected? No problemo.
It’s frustrating seeing people my age or younger than me (36) who think they’re fighting for progress but are just perpetuating the same cycle of hatred and dehumanization that they think they’re opposing. They’re closer to the fascists they decry than they’ll ever admit by picking an arbitrary group of people and ascribing all their problems to it.
If I were like the people I’ve been arguing with here, I’d assume we’re all lost, but I know there are plenty of gen x, millennials, gen z, gen alpha and, yes, boomers, who are ACTUALLY opposed to this kind of crap so that the world will keep chugging along. I’ll just remain perpetually annoyed the whole time.
Mostly to me it’s just really funny. Like it’s also really sad, that’s true, but it’s also funny, because of almost how incredibly stupid and shortsighted it is. Like, what does everyone think is gonna happen in 50 or 60 years? All the zoomers and millenials perpetuating this shit are just gonna get blamed equally by all of gen alpha and beta for deflecting all the blame onto boomers, and having done nothing to prevent, or even turn back, say, climate change. Or microplastics, or maybe like, if they’re really on the level, all of gen alpha will really get on their parents case for being absentee parents that abandoned them to a horrible digital wasteland via ipad.
Like unless we gain empathy, and, beyond that, understanding, as to why each generation acted the way they did, unless we gain that insight and historical context, we’re just gonna keep treading water, as every new generation has to figure out everything by themselves, and can never learn from the mistakes of their progenitors. You don’t even need to like boomers, or boomer culture, or really even like, morally approve of why they did the things they did, you just need to understand how they justified it, and what they were thinking at the time. But people don’t wanna do that, instead it’s just easier to blame the olds.
I think one of the things you’re saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person’s or any one group’s control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it “the kids are puritan pilled.” And of course even that’s not true for all of them. We’re all products of the world in which we live and it’s easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.