FYI Ian, I got my first house at 44 in 2001, it was in such poor shape it needed to be gutted. Working every spare minute for 3 years I completed the task with skills I learned in my late teens and early twenties. I live in an 850 ft^2 house…and you call me a lucky ducky…and truth be told, I am, 4 of my friends [my age BTW, whom I am helping] are respectively, about to be put onto the street, living in a car, in a shelter and living in my house. Ooooh but we have it too good…we have too much…sure Ian. My new next door neighbor is a nice kid of 20, his parents [also my neighbors] helped with a 20% down payment, the house was in foreclosure fully rehabbed and was bought for 129,000.00. They both have lousy jobs, but good parents/in-laws and their prospects are good, however, they have less than me…so I should give them what I have…even though they are waaay ahead of where I was when I was their age. Using average statistics to avocate for generational war is beyond dumb. The upper class inherits when their parents die…Ian, that usually happens when people get older and skews the numbers? To repeat the often told tale about how averages skew, “four homeless men are under a bridge, Bill Gates walks by, now the average income of men sheltered by a bridge is in the billions”. That is the argument you used above.

Anybody that is unemployed over say 40 in engineering is going to stay that way and the numbers bear that out. I only work because I travel state to state getting a job when the project gets way behind and they hire me for a 2-3 month gig. And that’s only because I have a history of working 60 hours a week to get the project back on track…while the office spends it’s day chattering about how they are getting screwed over…I come in before them, leave afterward and work Saturday & Sunday. When I am working, I pinch penny’s so when I am unemployed I can hold out…and that’s how it will be until I drop dead. But you are right Ian, I should give my money to the folks who spend their day surfing the web and complaining. Yep, that will be fair, they already make more money, but hey, Ian says I’m the oppresser based on average incomes. BTW, these 20-30 something folks don’t miss an opportunity to insult me, or talk up my age. Most are too clueless to realize that in 10 years they will be on the street.

You think the Obama kids can carry out reform Ian, I think not. Unlike the Obama kewl kids I met at the state caucus [we used to have an open primary here]…I knew who Obama was AND WHO WAS ON his ECONOMIC TEAM. The kids didn’t want to hear it, Obama was kewl, Hillary was a “C&#T”…nothing about policy, just conjecture and senseless ad hominem attacks like. “You are a racist if you vote for Hillary. Let me add, I don’t like Hillary, her foreign policy sucks, but her economic team was devoid of Bill’s stupid a–holes Rubin-Summers, plus Obama had doubled down with Wall Street’s fan bois Golsbee & Giethner.
Who these a–holes on Obama’s ECONOMIC TEAM were…and why it was important was met with insults and ordering me to be silent about their God, Obama or they would shut me up. When the threats didn’t work, a guy shoved me, I dropped kick him to the ground…he ran off like a wussy and got the cops. There were enough witnesses that his version of me dropping him out of the blue got shouted down…I filed a cross complaint and the cop started talking about filing a false police report and Obama’s kewl kids melted away. Not exactly the kind of young men you’d want to carry out a revolution with Ian.

If you counting on Kewl Kids to carry reform forward Ian I think you are kidding yourself.

http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparebar.jsp?ind=10&cat=1

I don’t have figures for more broken down cohorts than that, but I’ll tell you that I’d put a lot of money that the youth cohort is poorer than the elderly cohort, and that they are poorer than their parents or grandparents were at their age, in real dollars-debt. I will state outright that every cohort is poorer than the next older cohort, and that they are poorer than the cohort before them was when they were their age, in real dollars, including debt.

Now, would it be good to retire more old people? Sure. It would also be good to just have more jobs, y’know. But you aren’t going to get that money by taxing young people, they don’t have the goddamn money. In fact they are massively in debt. If the old people want to retire they have to tax the rich and corporations. What the old are doing right now is loading the young down with massive debt, and forcing them to buy health insurance they can’t afford.

Who do they think is going to buy their houses? Hmmm?

The old are better off than youth, so what we should do is give them more money first?

Trickle down generational economics, I guess. It would work as well as the original trickle down economics did.

When we decide to help everyone, we can help everyone. That will include fixing pensions, yes (I would suggest ending private pensions entirely, if we’re talking ideal policy). But it will include much more than that.

Tax the rich and let the banks fail and all this can be fixed. Until then, it won’t be.

Special pleading for this group or that group is most of what liberals do these days. Break the rich, nothing else will work.

Once the social contract is broken, once everyone doesn’t look after everyone, then you can’t expect the young to say “well, I’ve been fucked by old folks but I’ll take care of them anyway.” And you can’t expect it in the sense that if you don’t punish betrayal, it will keep happening. Same thing with the rich. Once upon a time the rich and the poor got richer at about the same rate (rich very slightly less in % terms, but much more in absolute). Now they don’t. The poor and the middle class must brutally punish the rich for this, or they will not stop.

The old have voted, again and again, for policies that fuck the young. Even in Quebec, the majority of the population would vote for the tuition increase. They want to take away advantages they enjoyed when they were young.

That’s despicable.

Of course, a lot of the old are playing the death bet, they will win it because they will die before the backlash. But many of the younger old won’t win it.

Contraire to “THE GREEDY BABY BOOMERS F%&#ed UP EVERYTHING” meme…so popular with wedge issue players [now...just who would have an interest in dividing the 99%...huh?], their minions…and easily duped patsy’s, the numbers just don’t support the greed angle.

This article should make clear [if you bother to read it] that those [particularly at the younger end] of this 1945-1965 demographic are getting a rawer deal than any in the post FDR world did.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/06/the-not-so-golden-years-revisited/

I am NOT A fan of Hillary, but she would NOT have cut & then “privatized” SSI the way Obama is trying to do. And Obama, as a [D], will succeed in destroying SSI irreversibly if he is re-elected. FYI, the spade work for “privatized” annuities is in ObamaCare. The Insurance Mandate that uses Government to compel you to buy a demonstrably defective product, if held constitutional, can be used to compel citizens to buy “private” annuities and..POOF…no more SSI. And that is why Obama is the greatest evil in the political sphere.

Why should the “younger” folks care about folks other than themselves? Read the article and clue in to why a secure retirement for older generations is good for those in their late teens and twenties…here’s a hint, think supply/demand.

Fun Facts:

In 1983 [the year we raised retirement and SSI taxes] from 90% of total national wages to the Social Security tax. Because of inequality in income growth since then (the rich growing richer), the amount of wages escaping such taxation has grown from 10% to about 15%

Social Security is currently estimated to keep roughly 40 percent of all Americans age 65 or older out of poverty.

Year of birth vs Normal retirement age
1937 and prior 65
1938 65 and 2 months
1939 65 and 4 months
1940 65 and 6 months
1941 65 and 8 months
1942 65 and 10 months
1943 to 1954 – 66 y.o.
1955 66 and 2 months
1956 66 and 4 months
1957 66 and 6 months
1958 66 and 8 months
1959 66 and 10 months
1960 and later – 67 y.o.

Year – Contribution (%)
1980 – 12.26
1983 – 13.40
1984 – 13.40
1985 – 14.10
1986 – 14.30
1987 – 14.30
1988 – 15.02
1989 – 15.02

In 1980, 38% of Americans had a defined benefit pension as their primary retirement plan. By 1997, just 21% of Americans had such plans, according to the Pension Benefits Council. That percentage is estimated at just 12% now. Explain to me the how the 1945-1965 demographic benefits by this?

1] Numbers make it clear, working class…that’s about 85~% of the 1945-1965 demographic [particularly at the younger end], have been targeted and taxed at a higher rate and forced to work longer.

2] The canard “people are living longer” is just that, for the lower income demographics it stabilized long ago and has been falling. Consider “..statistically, when an adult in 1920 turned 60 years old, he could expect to live an average of 17 more years, to about 77. Today, a 60 year old adult can expect to live 19 more years, to about 79. Now look at the SSI retirement age above and tell me we are making progress.

So while it’s true more people survive to/through their working years because they don’t die in youth they do not live much longer than their great grandparents did. The “modern” notion embraced by [D's] & [R's] that human’s should work until their bodies give out and then warehoused until death, is not in a young person’s interest…either near or long term. Now who would want to convince 99% of America’s youth to advocate against their own interests…hmmm.

Ian, you have the floor

He could reasonably have said “do you really, REALLY think the black guy in the clapboard house next door is a bigger threat to your peace and comfort than the coal companies or the defense contractors or the land speculators?”

At any rate, society hasn’t liked its Cassandras since, well Cassandra. But we need them more than ever.

The Guardian had an article the other day, “Bank bailout makes Spaniards question their future as agonies mount”, and when I looked, the highest rated comment suggested that, “Justice won’t be done until we see bankers and real estate agents hanging from lampposts.”

On Krugman’s last column, the top rated comment was just the same old partisan sniping, but the second highest rated comment ended by saying, “Regular people are scraping by with less and less, even as corporate profits soar. Call it the class war, call it a reign of terror. I am beginning to think we are all on one of those secret kill lists.”

That was not on Free Republic or Daily Kos, that was on the New York Times. I think the 1% is underestimating just how much anger is accumulating out there. Maybe they feel it can safely be directed at Muslims or Blacks or the poor or unions or the public sector or at the Republicrats or the Demopublicans indefinitely, but I wonder. Every time a country like Ireland votes in more austerity and finds itself falling further into the abyss as a result, the spring just gets compressed a little more.

In the couch potato TV era maybe this wouldn’t have come to anything, but in the internet era, I’m not so sure.

However, the greater tragedy occurred much earlier under Truman who did not go after the US Nazi supporters [who had gone to ground] post WWII, instead allowing them to breed & multiply in the Departments of State and the national security apparatus. These post hoc Nazi’s overruled agents on the ground who saw the young WWII resistance fighters, most of whom could be describe in today’s term as being US friendly nationalist, with socialist leanings and instead supported the quislings of WWII. Think, Greece, Viet Nam, Yugoslavia, Italy, France…et al.

These US born Nazi’s saw the danger that some day they might be investigated and hung as traitors…so they projected what they had done onto the active progressive of the day, hence the communist witch hunts. The communist witch hunts disabled the people most likely to go after the Nazi Traitors in this country…and the traitors were numerous…and were well represented in the .1%.

Much suffering has come from the US’s domestic Nazi’s in international and domestic affairs…as I see it, they have won the peace, defeating progress and destroying the programs of FDR, the person most responsible for their defeat.