Boomer Bust

If you were born between the years 1946 and 1964, congratulations! You are a baby boomer just like me. There is some question as to whom coined the term. But popular consensus gives credit to one Sylvia Porter, who was a financial columnist with 40 million followers, who in 1951 wrote: "Take the 3,548,000 babies born in 1950. Bundle them into a batch, bounce them all over the bountiful land that is America. What do you get? Boom. The biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history." Well, there you are.

Us members of the Baby Boom generation have been both blessed and cursed. Because of the demographic bulge in the population, most boomers faced a shortage of just about everything. For example, as the boomers entered grade school, there was a shortage of classrooms as well as a shortage of teachers and books. In what would be a nightmare to today’s education do-gooders, boomer class sizes usually ranged from 35 per class in public schools, to between 50-60 in a class in parochial schools. Many students had to share not only desks, but school books. Yet we all managed to learn to read and write and do arithmetic with nary a complaint. How did we survive?

And it followed us throughout our lives. Getting into college was difficult. When we graduated, too many people were looking for too few jobs. Housing costs skyrocketed when we reached the home buying age. Those same housing prices are falling as we try to sell the mammoth homes we bought trying to "downsize." Health care is now being rationed either by the government and/or the insurance companies. Pensions have been slashed. Social Security is on the verge bankruptcy. That demographic bulge has strained societal limits again.

Boomers were spoiled by indulgent parents. Dr. Spock was the kid raising guru, whose book probably would have been better used smacking us on our butts. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” disappeared from the lexicon. We did drugs, sex and rock 'n roll in the sixties, discoed in the seventies, made money in the eighties, digitalized in the 90’s, and are now retiring in the new millennium to enjoy the fruits of inherited wealth from our parents estimated to be a whopping $11.6 trillion!! It is the largest transfer of generational wealth in history. No wonder the government wants an estate tax. And it’s lucky for us that we got that money, because the savings rate among boomers was, for all practicable purposes, nonexistent.

A soon to be decimated health system has kept boomers healthier than any previous generation, and many are opting to keep working. Eighty is the new seventy and sixty is the new forty, and the women in particular are silicone and botoxed up…with the men not too far behind…and lots and lots of tanning.

While the boomer parents are primarily luddites, boomers themselves have adapted to the age of computers. The fastest growing segment registering for Facebook are between the agest of 55 and 65. And we can drive down the streets with a cell phone strapped to our hearing aids as good as the next guy.

Being a boomer gives you a glass half full glass half empty choice. All of societal problems were magnified for the boomer generation simply because society at all levels was not geared to handling so many people. Social Security will be the ultimate test as the government struggles to find a way to pay to the boomers what was promised…and will most likely fail. Look for means testing and an ever older retirement age…70 seems to be the number being bandied about.

On the other hand, a close friend of mine set he enjoyed being a boomer because he had the opportunity to meet all sorts of people in his class of 55 students at Ursuline High School, and has remained close friends with them throughout the years.

I fall somewhere in between. But here’s the funny thing. The older I get, the less I seem to care. Lets see…a shortage of classrooms; a shortage of books; a shortage of jobs; a shortage of money for college; a shortage of housing; a shortage of health care; a shortage of social security. Next up: a shortage of cemetery plots!!!! Cremation urns anyone? Peace!!!!