“When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now, will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”
I bring this up because I’m going to be 64 later this year and I just received a letter from the good people at “The SCOOTER Store.” According to their literature, all I need do is call their 800 number, speak with a “mobility consultant” and once qualified, take delivery of my personal “Power Chair,” at little or no cost. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because they make this pitch to anyone who is anywhere near retirement age.
If you don’t know, a “baby boomer” is anyone born in the years between 1946 and 1964. We represent 35 percent of the population and currently make up the majority of the political, cultural, corporate and academic leadership in the United States. As it turns out, even though we are dying at the rate of more than 2,000 per day, we represent the largest generation to ever retire.
I belong to the first wave of the baby boom generation and must admit it never really occurred to me that this moment would ever arrive. Where did all the years go? Looking back, my lifetime seems to have gone by faster than it takes to say “senior discount.”
We early boomers once had all the advantages. We grew up in an era of prosperity that none of us ever thought would end. We were the Woodstock nation who did our best to make the world a better place by using civil disobedience to help bring the beginning of the end to discrimination in our schools, housing and the workplace.
In the 1970s and ’80s, we invested in real estate when houses were still cheap, and then enjoyed significant financial gains when the later boomers came along and pushed up the cost of housing. In addition, many of us got great jobs because we were the first to arrive in the post-industrial economy and then got into the stock market early on and rode that great wave to its crash.
During the last 30-plus years, baby boomers have accounted for about half of all consumer spending to support a lifestyle that depended on cheap credit and oil. We could quite literally make or break a product brand. When we embraced Japanese cars, they became the world’s biggest car makers. When we shunned the Oldsmobile, it died.
Although some of us may have enjoyed great prosperity, one thing that baby boomers of all persuasions did, in an unprecedented degree, was to live beyond their means by spending money instead of saving it. If we ran out of cash, we financed our lifestyle. We earned and spent more money than most of our Depression-baby parents ever dreamed of. When I think about how frugal my parents were, it’s no wonder they were able to save for retirement. They actually lived within their means.
In contrast, a recent study done by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that only 46 percent of American workers currently say they are saving anything for retirement and the amount they are saving continues to shrink. Overall, Americans now save just one penny for every dollar earned.
With baby boomers reaching the sunset of their careers at the same time our nation’s birth rate is declining, the coming generational shift is going to be more than a major challenge; it’s going too be an unprecedented reset of our their retirement expectations. Economists say boomers will need to replace some $2 trillion of wealth lost in retirement funds during the recent stock meltdown, plus the billions in home equity that have vanished in the housing crash.
What we’re facing is a fundamental restructuring of our economy that may result in higher tax rates, increased unemployment, lower health benefits, postponed retirement and a host of other societal ills.
If the economic crisis is as bad as some predict, housing prices and share values might not bounce back for years to come. Japan’s economic meltdown took 10 years to recover. It may take that long for the financial wreckage from this “boomer-bust” to be cleared away and for the 80 million-strong “Millennial Generation” — most of whom are still in high school or college — to enter adulthood and start buying their own homes, cars and gadgets.
The success and excesses of the baby boom generation are not unlike comparable historical factors responsible for the rise and fall of nations. The premise is that great nations (generations) start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
So in the end, what will we baby boomers have learned from this extraordinary financial crisis we’re fighting to win? Unfortunately, quite possibly nothing more than we have met the enemy ... and they are us.
Merrell Wood is the founder of Middletown Habitat for Humanity, TV Middletown and the Sink or Swim pool campaign.