US braces for baby boom retirement wave

The first of the vast US baby boom generation goes into retirement in January, setting off a demographic tidal wave with wide-ranging economic, political and social implications. [snip]

The cost for government-funded social security and medical care for the boomers leaves a funding gap of between 40 and 76 trillion dollars for next 75 years, according to various estimates. [snip]

Leonard Steinhorn, an American University professor and author of “The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy,” says the generation often wrongly maligned as latte-sipping Yuppies has transformed most of American society.

They sure fooled the rest of the world, didn’t they? Wasn’t the Bonfire of the Vanities their signature piece?

He wrote that boomers have led or sustained most of “the great citizen movements that have advanced American values and freedoms — the environmental movement, the consumer movement, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the diversity movement, the human rights movement, the openness in government movement.”

For the civil rights movement, they cannot have credit. They didn’t do that. As for the enviro and women’s movement they can have these, no one else wants credit for those debacles.

He told AFP he expects this transformation to continue as boomers age. “It’s not going to be a generation that’s going to go off to the golf courses and do nothing.”

Of course not, with tanning salons, fern bars and of course spinning classes, there will be no time for the golf course. Tossing  in the requisite nail wrap and the odd Botox shot gives quite a grueling day. How will they ever cope with that schedule?

He said boomers will push politics to a more progressive bent even though that has not yet happened because the more conservative over-60 generation still carries much weight in the electorate.

“Once younger voters begin to replace them, the socially conservative vote will dwindle,” he said. [snip]

The boomer generation is hardly monolithic. For the left side, Hillary is the guidon, so can you spell passé?

Archived in: Bill Clinton, Boomers, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Yuppies