The Theft of a Decade by Joseph C. Sternberg

Author:Joseph C. Sternberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Saturday-Morning Bank Heist

MY SIBLINGS AND I SOMETIMES JOKE THAT MY YOUNGER BROTHER IS OUR parents’ retirement plan. I’m a journalist; it’s not a field people go into to become fabulously wealthy so that they can support their aging relatives. My sister, Hannah, the baby of the family, works happily in communications with a side of novel writing and rock music. But David—well, David made better life choices than the rest of us. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering while enrolled in ROTC. Now he’s a pilot in the air force, and if he ever decides to retire from that he can look forward to a lucrative career at an airline or a defense contractor. He’ll always have money to spare for Mom and Dad in their old age.

That’s all a family in-joke because in fact our parents have saved for their own retirements and also, seemingly unlike so many Boomers, plan to have their home paid off before they retire. But pardon Millennials as a whole if we don’t laugh—because to an astounding degree, we all really are our parents’ retirement plans.

I’ve argued in this book that Boomers have stolen a decade (or more) from Millennials. When it comes to the job market, or the educational “investment” racket, or the homeownership crisis, Millennials have been mugged in broad daylight—we know immediately what has happened to us and can pick the offender out of a lineup. But now it’s time to talk about a different kind of theft—the taxing, spending, and borrowing choices Boomers have made, for which their children will have to pay. Boomers’ fiscal capers are more like a bank robbery in the early hours of a Saturday morning on Memorial Day weekend. The robbery is already over—the vault is empty—but no one will see what happened until the bank reopens on Tuesday morning.

The Boomers’ fingerprints are all over the crime scene, and the crowbar they used to clean out the vault is deficit spending. As astronomical as the US deficit and debt seem today, we Millennials ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The real drain is the entitlements for the elderly, especially Social Security and Medicare. We’ve barely begun to pay these costs for the Boomers, and by the time they’re done retiring, it’s not clear we’ll be able to afford to pay for anything else. Worse, Boomers have spent the last decade relentlessly expanding the entitlement bill we’ll one day have to pay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.