6 ms·

Battle between generations due to baby boomer debt legacy

42 points by sbochins 14y ago

stephengillie 14y ago
Their generation got lost in space, and left behind the rest of us in the ashes of their world. We have to deal with the aging infrastructure, horrid basic education system, a re-broken economy, and now sky-high debt. And that generation is forcing us to pay them for aging, then pay for our own old age as the system will be broken by then.
- bromang 14y ago
  Is the American education system really that bad? What are the obvious ways of improving the situation?
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    The US education system is fine compared to those of Europe and Asia. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-average-american.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...
    - tokenadult 14y ago
      The US education system is fine compared to those of Europe and Asia. The factual statement is incorrect as to results of instruction, and the statement is well known to be incorrect by any widely traveled person who has studied the educational system in multiple countries, especially those who have made specific study of typical school textbooks and teaching methods in various countries. Anyway, the links offered in support of your prima-facie false statement are not written by a person who is familiar with United States education and have been called out before here on Hacker News as crap links, contrary to http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads." AFTER EDIT: As I go out to take my son to his soccer practice, it occurs to me that the factual assumption in the grandparent comment needs examination as well. It IS a fact that schools are quite well funded in the United States compared to how they are funded in other countries. School funding in the United States is quite uneven from region to region, but in almost all regions is well above world averages, and some United States schools receive more dollars per pupil than schools nearly anywhere. So my statement about the RESULTS of schools in the United States should be interpreted as a statement that United States schools disappoint compared to what a large percentage of public funds are devoted to them. Many countries do better in that regard of efficiency. To the point of the submitted article, one fiscal overhang that older generations of school employees are leaving for younger generations of pupils and students is large pension obligations for those school employees, which are far from fully funded in most states, and are very lavish by worldwide standards. SECOND EDIT: The ball is in your court this time, yummyfajitas. I invite the readers of HN to determine whether you have ever been a straight shooter on this issue any of the many times you have submitted that crap link. I'm not aware that you have done any of the travel or reading necessary to evaluate the statements in those links accurately. Let's ask lots of HN participants to take a close look at the actual evidence on education peformance per dollar expended in different countries and think carefully about how well the United States is really doing. (My user profile, which readers can view in my absence from this discussion, explains some of my basis for knowledge for why I say the United States school system does not do as well as it ought to do.)
      - yummyfajitas 14y ago
        As always (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028), you fail to address the data, preferring instead to make logical fallacies (typically argument by authority, now borderline ad-hominem). The HN readership is smart enough to see through this, and I'd be very surprised if you convinced a single person. Why do you persist in it? [Edit, in response to your edit: I cited data. Do you dispute the data or not? Note that an argument from authority is not the same as a data-driven argument.]
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        stephengillie 14y ago
        drama++
lkrubner 14y ago
The Iraq war, or new roads and bridges and clean coal burning plants? Massive tax cuts for the rich, or investments in education? Lax regulation of bank loans and credit card loans, or time-tested traditions of banking prudence? Multi-million dollar payouts to health insurance CEOs (Cigna CEO David Cordani made the most, at $19.1 million, in 2011) or universal health care for all citizens? A vast bureaucracy devoted to keeping entrepreneurs in their home countries, or the "Land of opportunity" offering a warm welcome for the worlds entrepreneurs? There were many decisions made that lead the USA to its current situation. Anyone who argues that government debt is the sole issue, or even the main issue, has failed to pay attention.
- sbochins 14y ago
  Unfortunately I think the baby boomers have had a hand in most of those issues or were too naive to know that they are problems. For example, seniors are against medicare reductions and don't want universal health care. This viewpoint has caused the debt to increase. Seniors are mostly against immigration, this has halted economic growth (therefore hindering government revenue). Seniors were more in favor of the Iraq war then younger folks. The list goes on...
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    Seniors not wanting universal healthcare is insane considering Medicare.
    - bcbrown 14y ago
      They already have theirs.
  - paulhauggis 14y ago
    The debt will increase with universal health care. "Seniors are mostly against immigration" Most Seniors I've talked to are against allowing anybody to come into the country with little or no incentive to pay taxes. This is much different than being against immigration. "Seniors were more in favor of the Iraq war then younger folks" Can you provide proof of this? "Unfortunately I think the baby boomers have had a hand in most of those issues or were too naive to know that they are problems." Since we are generalizing here, I will thrown my 2 cents in. Some of the opinions I see are similar to a child not listening to their parent because they only see what's in front of them and don't have the life experience or the forethought to see what can and will happen. Many older folks have the life experience and wisdom. Universal health care is a good example. Every time I see an article on here, Reddit, or anywhere else on the Internet, none of the proponents will talk about the negative effects of universal health care. They aren't even willing to discuss them. I've lived long enough to know that nothing in this world is perfect. If we can't talk about it honestly, I will never vote for it. I know I'm not alone.
adjwilli 14y ago
A option they seemed to have left out is raising the "inheritance tax". If these baby boomers got Reagan tax breaks in their prime earning years, we should compensate by increasing the "death tax".
- bking 14y ago
  So when they do finally pass on and leave their wealth the government takes it and mismanages it?
  - gergles 14y ago
    The government takes it to pay for the benefits they got in excess of what they paid in while they were alive. Look at the chart in the article.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      Good thing none of them will think of spending it or giving it away before they die. Really, while there are arguments to be made for and against estate taxes, using it to correct a generational imbalance is incredibly silly.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jug6ernaut 14y ago
  The "death tax" should be abolished. Its ridiculous, even beyond the ridiculous notion of taxing someone to die, how many times should YOUR money get taxed? Once? Twice? Three times? When does it stop? Our (U.S.) tax code is absolutely horrible, but even with that revenue isn't the problem, spending is. I would say that politicians will ALWAYS spend every dime they have, but in reality they spend money they dont have. Awesome system we have.
  - luser001 14y ago
    I'll ignore your grossly inaccurate phrase "taxing someone to die". your money is taxed once: when you receive it. Until you receive it, it isn't your money, it's your parent's.
meric 14y ago
"....boomers now sell off assets to finance retirement, putting pressure on equity prices and denying young workers an easy route to wealth" Not true. Imagine if all stocks had 250 P/E and are now coming back down to 10 P/E in one month. Who benefits? Cheaper equity means higher yield, and higher yield means an easy route to wealth. If you are young, don't let the reserve bank fool you into thinking rising prices is good. You have a whole life of investing in you. Would you celebrate every time, after you fill up a tank of petrol, the price of petrol goes up? That's ridiculous, and I encourage you to think the same for prices of investments. Prices are kept high means when you buy the overpriced investments from other people, some of your wealth is being transferred to them.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >Would you celebrate every time, after you fill up a tank of petrol, the price of petrol goes up? The flaw in the analogy is that inflation isn't the price of petrol, it's the price of everything. Including wages. If in week 1 you make $1000 and spend $1000 and in week two all prices go up (including the price of your labor) so that you make $2000 and spend $2000, you don't actually care that the nominal price of commodities is increasing as long as they don't rise faster than your pay. And most investments work the same way: If you own a share of Ford and the Fed prints a trillion dollars, the nominal share price is going to go up the same as the price of anything else. The people inflation hurts are those who have long-term agreements with fixed price terms. If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, you benefit from inflation, and the bank that owns the mortgage pays for it. If you have a ten year fixed-rate certificate of deposit, the bank benefits from inflation and the CD holder takes the beating. But as a general rule, retirees will tend to be the ones who have CDs or fixed-rate annuities or the like, and the youth will be the ones to have student loans or owe large amounts of principal on a mortgage.
  - meric 14y ago
    Sorry, I meant in real terms but I didn't specify it. Or they'll be like me with barely $5000 invested in stocks - To get a comfortable retirement I'll probably need to invest at least $10,000 a year. However, if the price of investments rise faster than my wage, I'll need to spend more to purchase investments to produce the same absolute yield. The income from my investments would also be reduced (due to reduced yield). You can argue they are capital gains, but the "capital gains" would only be permanent if the company's assets or income was increased permanently. What I am saying is the increase in price for investments resulting in lower yield without justification is not a good thing for buyers of said investments. I have a $50,000 student debt owed to the government, whose interest is indexed to CPI. There is no point for me to pay off my loan early besides what the government requires me to do. So, I constantly invest my excess earnings.
MaysonL 14y ago
Of course, in 50 years, when we boomers are almost all dead (assuming no singularity), to whom will the debt be owed? To the children and grandchildren of the boomers. This between generations battle BS is just BS.
- stevenkovar 14y ago
  It's less about to whom the debt is going so much as where.
jf 14y ago
This is a little bit of a tangent, but I recently found this animated GIF which does a great job of illustrating just how _big_ "the baby boom" is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Population_by_gender_1950-2010.gif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Population_b...
- quantumhobbit 14y ago
  That is a really cool GIF. I love how you can see the "echo" of the baby boom when they started having their own kids. It also shows the incredible increase in life-expectancy we have seen over the past century. Instead of dying off, the top of the chart just seems to grow upward.
joshuahedlund 14y ago
It's simple mathematics. A whole bunch of people are forecasted to receive a bunch more than they put in, which is unsustainable once the population isn't growing fast enough to make up the difference. For an illustration of how difficult this will be to solve, just read some of the Boomer comments on this article, expressing outrage at the notion that they should have benefits cut because of how much they have put in, as if it's unthinkable that they will receive more than they put in, and that this is unsustainable.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
A half-truth being told to distract from the broader class struggle which the Economist's ideology says cannot ever happen.
tokenadult 14y ago
I think this article has been submitted before. (The submission here is not a submission of the canonical URL.) Anyway, by the usual generation labeling in the United States, the most profligate generation in United States history is the "Silent Generation," the generation mostly born during the Great Depression (who make up the parent generation of the younger half of the Baby Boom). They began and sustained the trend of spending far in advance of revenue, all the while thinking that they "earned" their government transfer payments. I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did. But the submitted article is correct that the older generations in the United States will have to rethink their attitude toward "entitlements" (transfer payments) even more if our children's generation is to have any prospect of continued economic growth. On my part, I'm happy to see my retirement age nudged up some more, and also for old-age benefits and other government benefits to take actual cuts (rather than merely decreases in their rate of increase over time) to make sure that they are funded on an actuarially sound basis. I vote like that, and I discuss the issue with my generation-mates in these terms. The older should be helping the younger, in general, not the other way around.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did. I think the key observation you're making is that baby boomers' parents will have had a better retirement than the baby boomers are likely to, because at the time their parents were retired, the boomers were in their prime working age and there were plenty of resources to care for the then-retirees. The trouble is that the converse is happening and about to happen. And there isn't really anything anyone could have done about it, other than maybe for the boomers to have had more kids. All of the attempts to do it through economic hocus pocus are kind of missing the point. The social security trust fund is a piece of paper that says there is a social security trust fund. The bonds it redeems still have to be paid by the treasury in the year the money is spent. The same goes for private retirement savings -- when you cash in your stocks and buy nursing services, you take a productive worker out of the economy to provide nursing services when that person could otherwise have been a scientist or small business owner or the like. The problem stems from the fact that the things retirees want are, as a general rule, less economically productive than the things working people want. Boomers having saved a substantial amount of money for retirement would actually make that problem worse because it means all the more resources under their control to be allocated to leisure and non-research medical care, rather than education and R&D and other such things that retirees have little personal incentive to demand. The article's suggestion (inflation) is only a solution in the sense that it reduces the economic power of the retirees, meaning that they get less healthcare and the young get more education and infrastructure. But the tradeoff is still inevitable -- they're just pointing out a method of making it in a way that moves the slider away from retirees in the face of the strong political power of the AARP, by placing the decision in the hands of the federal reserve board which is not as easily influenced by lobby groups as elected officials.
ktizo 14y ago
I wonder if people in general will ever get wise to divide and conquer distractions. It nearly always works. This one is particularly insidious however.

42 points by sbochins 14y ago

Their generation got lost in space, and left behind the rest of us in the ashes of their world. We have to deal with the aging infrastructure, horrid basic education system, a re-broken economy, and now sky-high debt. And that generation is forcing us to pay them for aging, then pay for our own old age as the system will be broken by then.

bromang 14y ago
Is the American education system really that bad? What are the obvious ways of improving the situation?
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  The US education system is fine compared to those of Europe and Asia. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-average-american.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    The US education system is fine compared to those of Europe and Asia. The factual statement is incorrect as to results of instruction, and the statement is well known to be incorrect by any widely traveled person who has studied the educational system in multiple countries, especially those who have made specific study of typical school textbooks and teaching methods in various countries. Anyway, the links offered in support of your prima-facie false statement are not written by a person who is familiar with United States education and have been called out before here on Hacker News as crap links, contrary to http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads." AFTER EDIT: As I go out to take my son to his soccer practice, it occurs to me that the factual assumption in the grandparent comment needs examination as well. It IS a fact that schools are quite well funded in the United States compared to how they are funded in other countries. School funding in the United States is quite uneven from region to region, but in almost all regions is well above world averages, and some United States schools receive more dollars per pupil than schools nearly anywhere. So my statement about the RESULTS of schools in the United States should be interpreted as a statement that United States schools disappoint compared to what a large percentage of public funds are devoted to them. Many countries do better in that regard of efficiency. To the point of the submitted article, one fiscal overhang that older generations of school employees are leaving for younger generations of pupils and students is large pension obligations for those school employees, which are far from fully funded in most states, and are very lavish by worldwide standards. SECOND EDIT: The ball is in your court this time, yummyfajitas. I invite the readers of HN to determine whether you have ever been a straight shooter on this issue any of the many times you have submitted that crap link. I'm not aware that you have done any of the travel or reading necessary to evaluate the statements in those links accurately. Let's ask lots of HN participants to take a close look at the actual evidence on education peformance per dollar expended in different countries and think carefully about how well the United States is really doing. (My user profile, which readers can view in my absence from this discussion, explains some of my basis for knowledge for why I say the United States school system does not do as well as it ought to do.)
    - yummyfajitas 14y ago
      As always (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028), you fail to address the data, preferring instead to make logical fallacies (typically argument by authority, now borderline ad-hominem). The HN readership is smart enough to see through this, and I'd be very surprised if you convinced a single person. Why do you persist in it? [Edit, in response to your edit: I cited data. Do you dispute the data or not? Note that an argument from authority is not the same as a data-driven argument.]
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - stephengillie 14y ago
        drama++

lkrubner 14y ago

The Iraq war, or new roads and bridges and clean coal burning plants? Massive tax cuts for the rich, or investments in education? Lax regulation of bank loans and credit card loans, or time-tested traditions of banking prudence? Multi-million dollar payouts to health insurance CEOs (Cigna CEO David Cordani made the most, at $19.1 million, in 2011) or universal health care for all citizens? A vast bureaucracy devoted to keeping entrepreneurs in their home countries, or the "Land of opportunity" offering a warm welcome for the worlds entrepreneurs? There were many decisions made that lead the USA to its current situation. Anyone who argues that government debt is the sole issue, or even the main issue, has failed to pay attention.

sbochins 14y ago
Unfortunately I think the baby boomers have had a hand in most of those issues or were too naive to know that they are problems. For example, seniors are against medicare reductions and don't want universal health care. This viewpoint has caused the debt to increase. Seniors are mostly against immigration, this has halted economic growth (therefore hindering government revenue). Seniors were more in favor of the Iraq war then younger folks. The list goes on...
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  Seniors not wanting universal healthcare is insane considering Medicare.
  - bcbrown 14y ago
    They already have theirs.
- paulhauggis 14y ago
  The debt will increase with universal health care. "Seniors are mostly against immigration" Most Seniors I've talked to are against allowing anybody to come into the country with little or no incentive to pay taxes. This is much different than being against immigration. "Seniors were more in favor of the Iraq war then younger folks" Can you provide proof of this? "Unfortunately I think the baby boomers have had a hand in most of those issues or were too naive to know that they are problems." Since we are generalizing here, I will thrown my 2 cents in. Some of the opinions I see are similar to a child not listening to their parent because they only see what's in front of them and don't have the life experience or the forethought to see what can and will happen. Many older folks have the life experience and wisdom. Universal health care is a good example. Every time I see an article on here, Reddit, or anywhere else on the Internet, none of the proponents will talk about the negative effects of universal health care. They aren't even willing to discuss them. I've lived long enough to know that nothing in this world is perfect. If we can't talk about it honestly, I will never vote for it. I know I'm not alone.

adjwilli 14y ago

A option they seemed to have left out is raising the "inheritance tax". If these baby boomers got Reagan tax breaks in their prime earning years, we should compensate by increasing the "death tax".

bking 14y ago
So when they do finally pass on and leave their wealth the government takes it and mismanages it?
- gergles 14y ago
  The government takes it to pay for the benefits they got in excess of what they paid in while they were alive. Look at the chart in the article.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Good thing none of them will think of spending it or giving it away before they die. Really, while there are arguments to be made for and against estate taxes, using it to correct a generational imbalance is incredibly silly.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jug6ernaut 14y ago
The "death tax" should be abolished. Its ridiculous, even beyond the ridiculous notion of taxing someone to die, how many times should YOUR money get taxed? Once? Twice? Three times? When does it stop? Our (U.S.) tax code is absolutely horrible, but even with that revenue isn't the problem, spending is. I would say that politicians will ALWAYS spend every dime they have, but in reality they spend money they dont have. Awesome system we have.
- luser001 14y ago
  I'll ignore your grossly inaccurate phrase "taxing someone to die". your money is taxed once: when you receive it. Until you receive it, it isn't your money, it's your parent's.

meric 14y ago

"....boomers now sell off assets to finance retirement, putting pressure on equity prices and denying young workers an easy route to wealth" Not true. Imagine if all stocks had 250 P/E and are now coming back down to 10 P/E in one month. Who benefits? Cheaper equity means higher yield, and higher yield means an easy route to wealth. If you are young, don't let the reserve bank fool you into thinking rising prices is good. You have a whole life of investing in you. Would you celebrate every time, after you fill up a tank of petrol, the price of petrol goes up? That's ridiculous, and I encourage you to think the same for prices of investments. Prices are kept high means when you buy the overpriced investments from other people, some of your wealth is being transferred to them.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>Would you celebrate every time, after you fill up a tank of petrol, the price of petrol goes up? The flaw in the analogy is that inflation isn't the price of petrol, it's the price of everything. Including wages. If in week 1 you make $1000 and spend $1000 and in week two all prices go up (including the price of your labor) so that you make $2000 and spend $2000, you don't actually care that the nominal price of commodities is increasing as long as they don't rise faster than your pay. And most investments work the same way: If you own a share of Ford and the Fed prints a trillion dollars, the nominal share price is going to go up the same as the price of anything else. The people inflation hurts are those who have long-term agreements with fixed price terms. If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, you benefit from inflation, and the bank that owns the mortgage pays for it. If you have a ten year fixed-rate certificate of deposit, the bank benefits from inflation and the CD holder takes the beating. But as a general rule, retirees will tend to be the ones who have CDs or fixed-rate annuities or the like, and the youth will be the ones to have student loans or owe large amounts of principal on a mortgage.
- meric 14y ago
  Sorry, I meant in real terms but I didn't specify it. Or they'll be like me with barely $5000 invested in stocks - To get a comfortable retirement I'll probably need to invest at least $10,000 a year. However, if the price of investments rise faster than my wage, I'll need to spend more to purchase investments to produce the same absolute yield. The income from my investments would also be reduced (due to reduced yield). You can argue they are capital gains, but the "capital gains" would only be permanent if the company's assets or income was increased permanently. What I am saying is the increase in price for investments resulting in lower yield without justification is not a good thing for buyers of said investments. I have a $50,000 student debt owed to the government, whose interest is indexed to CPI. There is no point for me to pay off my loan early besides what the government requires me to do. So, I constantly invest my excess earnings.

MaysonL 14y ago

Of course, in 50 years, when we boomers are almost all dead (assuming no singularity), to whom will the debt be owed? To the children and grandchildren of the boomers. This between generations battle BS is just BS.

stevenkovar 14y ago
It's less about to whom the debt is going so much as where.

jf 14y ago

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I recently found this animated GIF which does a great job of illustrating just how _big_ "the baby boom" is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Population_by_gender_1950-2010.gif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Population_b...

quantumhobbit 14y ago
That is a really cool GIF. I love how you can see the "echo" of the baby boom when they started having their own kids. It also shows the incredible increase in life-expectancy we have seen over the past century. Instead of dying off, the top of the chart just seems to grow upward.

joshuahedlund 14y ago

It's simple mathematics. A whole bunch of people are forecasted to receive a bunch more than they put in, which is unsustainable once the population isn't growing fast enough to make up the difference. For an illustration of how difficult this will be to solve, just read some of the Boomer comments on this article, expressing outrage at the notion that they should have benefits cut because of how much they have put in, as if it's unthinkable that they will receive more than they put in, and that this is unsustainable.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

A half-truth being told to distract from the broader class struggle which the Economist's ideology says cannot ever happen.

tokenadult 14y ago

I think this article has been submitted before. (The submission here is not a submission of the canonical URL.) Anyway, by the usual generation labeling in the United States, the most profligate generation in United States history is the "Silent Generation," the generation mostly born during the Great Depression (who make up the parent generation of the younger half of the Baby Boom). They began and sustained the trend of spending far in advance of revenue, all the while thinking that they "earned" their government transfer payments. I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did. But the submitted article is correct that the older generations in the United States will have to rethink their attitude toward "entitlements" (transfer payments) even more if our children's generation is to have any prospect of continued economic growth. On my part, I'm happy to see my retirement age nudged up some more, and also for old-age benefits and other government benefits to take actual cuts (rather than merely decreases in their rate of increase over time) to make sure that they are funded on an actuarially sound basis. I vote like that, and I discuss the issue with my generation-mates in these terms. The older should be helping the younger, in general, not the other way around.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have, and have paid a higher rate of payroll or self-employment taxes into Social Security than my parents generally did. I think the key observation you're making is that baby boomers' parents will have had a better retirement than the baby boomers are likely to, because at the time their parents were retired, the boomers were in their prime working age and there were plenty of resources to care for the then-retirees. The trouble is that the converse is happening and about to happen. And there isn't really anything anyone could have done about it, other than maybe for the boomers to have had more kids. All of the attempts to do it through economic hocus pocus are kind of missing the point. The social security trust fund is a piece of paper that says there is a social security trust fund. The bonds it redeems still have to be paid by the treasury in the year the money is spent. The same goes for private retirement savings -- when you cash in your stocks and buy nursing services, you take a productive worker out of the economy to provide nursing services when that person could otherwise have been a scientist or small business owner or the like. The problem stems from the fact that the things retirees want are, as a general rule, less economically productive than the things working people want. Boomers having saved a substantial amount of money for retirement would actually make that problem worse because it means all the more resources under their control to be allocated to leisure and non-research medical care, rather than education and R&D and other such things that retirees have little personal incentive to demand. The article's suggestion (inflation) is only a solution in the sense that it reduces the economic power of the retirees, meaning that they get less healthcare and the young get more education and infrastructure. But the tradeoff is still inevitable -- they're just pointing out a method of making it in a way that moves the slider away from retirees in the face of the strong political power of the AARP, by placing the decision in the hands of the federal reserve board which is not as easily influenced by lobby groups as elected officials.

ktizo 14y ago

I wonder if people in general will ever get wise to divide and conquer distractions. It nearly always works. This one is particularly insidious however.