Bad Government Bosses Squandered Boomers' Taxes—Now Boomers are Blamed
Who's fault is it that Social Security is going bankrupt? Baby Boomers? I don't think so. All we hear about is the huge population of Baby Boomers who will take more from social security than it has to give. Excuse me, but what happened to all the money the huge population of Baby Boomers paid in income and social security taxes over the last 40 years?
If there's a big bubble now, there was a big bubble then. While the government received windfall revenues from the largest population of workers ever in the history of the United States, what were the OMB economists and politicians doing? Did it not occur to them that this generation of heavy-taxpaying citizens was going to grow old? It should have looked like a seasonal cash flow problem to them—the kind of problem that budgeters with even the most meager resources know how to handle—when you get most of your income in one season, you save for the slower seasons. Got a glut of tax revenue in one generation? Save for its old age—it's practically a no-brainer. But it's so much easier to blame the generation whose taxes were squandered for still being alive.
And now the trend is to blame Baby Boomers for the demise of corporate pensions! What were those OMB economists and politicians doing while the global marketplace was developing the capacity to compete with the US on price? Why didn't it occur to those supposedly forward-looking people that US companies were going to have to cut costs to compete? Why did they continue to allow US employers to hold the Boomer generation hostage for health benefits and pensions when simple math calculations would show those costs couldn't be sustained in the age of globalization?
It was the Silent Generation that made all those decisions. Now the Boomer generation is trying to help make late-life easier for its children—because Boomers learned the hard way that silence isn't golden.
If there's a big bubble now, there was a big bubble then. While the government received windfall revenues from the largest population of workers ever in the history of the United States, what were the OMB economists and politicians doing? Did it not occur to them that this generation of heavy-taxpaying citizens was going to grow old? It should have looked like a seasonal cash flow problem to them—the kind of problem that budgeters with even the most meager resources know how to handle—when you get most of your income in one season, you save for the slower seasons. Got a glut of tax revenue in one generation? Save for its old age—it's practically a no-brainer. But it's so much easier to blame the generation whose taxes were squandered for still being alive.
And now the trend is to blame Baby Boomers for the demise of corporate pensions! What were those OMB economists and politicians doing while the global marketplace was developing the capacity to compete with the US on price? Why didn't it occur to those supposedly forward-looking people that US companies were going to have to cut costs to compete? Why did they continue to allow US employers to hold the Boomer generation hostage for health benefits and pensions when simple math calculations would show those costs couldn't be sustained in the age of globalization?
It was the Silent Generation that made all those decisions. Now the Boomer generation is trying to help make late-life easier for its children—because Boomers learned the hard way that silence isn't golden.
