[Questionmark]

I know the answer to the original question. It's that they didn't go wrong anywhere and are merely a product of their environment. Everyone here should know the history of oil in America and realize that it is no coincidence that our most prosperous decades (50's and 60's) occurred when the U.S. was reaching it's peak in oil production and still a net exporter. And therein lies the answer, the boomers were raised during a period of near constant economic growth and so the culture that developed around that reality is one where the incentive to save disappears. Since you were likely to make more money the next year than you did this year it made little sense to save or be frugal.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Questionmark', 'I') know the answer to the original question. It's that they didn't go wrong anywhere and are merely a product of their environment. Everyone here should know the history of oil in America and realize that it is no coincidence that our most prosperous decades (50's and 60's) occurred when the U.S. was reaching it's peak in oil production and still a net exporter. And therein lies the answer, the boomers were raised during a period of near constant economic growth and so the culture that developed around that reality is one where the incentive to save disappears. Since you were likely to make more money the next year than you did this year it made little sense to save or be frugal.

[efarmer]

+1 more

You hit the nail on the head for sure.
I try to think of stuff like that until I smell rubber burning and have to quit.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Questionmark', 'I') know the answer to the original question. It's that they didn't go wrong anywhere and are merely a product of their environment. Everyone here should know the history of oil in America and realize that it is no coincidence that our most prosperous decades (50's and 60's) occurred when the U.S. was reaching it's peak in oil production and still a net exporter. And therein lies the answer, the boomers were raised during a period of near constant economic growth and so the culture that developed around that reality is one where the incentive to save disappears. Since you were likely to make more money the next year than you did this year it made little sense to save or be frugal.

[Cid_Yama]

Only problem with your analysis is the Hippie Generation was a worldwide phenomena.

The world was a friendlier place most likely because there were only 3 billion people on the planet in 1960.

The fact that the world has degenerated so badly since 1980 is no doubt due to the more than doubling of the population since 1960.

Real wages have not increased since the 1970's. The workplace changed, where previously, employees would stay in the same job all their lives and have a pension.

Employers were quick to take advantage of the expanding workforce by laying off older workers to cut their pension obligations and higher wage expenditures, and changed the nature of the workplace to short term and temporary.

Then came automation, computerization, globalization and outsourcing.

The fleecing of the pension funds by Wall St during the Bush administration has now finshed the work of disenfranchising all of the subsequent generations.

Oh, I forgot, they're not quite done. They are still trying to get their hands on the $2 trillion plus in the Social Security Insurance Fund and eliminate Social Security.

When you see the elderly sleeping in doorways and dying in the streets, then they'll be done.

If Generation Jones was busy trying to preserve the best of what came before, the Generation X'ers were probably the first to begin to recognize just how much they were being screwed.

I think maybe the girls were right. Can I get a light sabre?

[Cid_Yama]

Technically I'm a pre-Boomer. I was born in 1943 (how I know so much about who was born in 1943.)

My undergraduate years encompassed the Kennedy Administration.

I started working for the State Department in 1965 during the Johnson Administration.

As I say, though a pre-Boomer I was a member of the generation that led up to the Hippies. The end of the Beat Generation. The Hippies actually grew out of the Beat Generation.

I dropped acid when it was still legal and saw the Doors perform at the Matrix in 1966. Few people realize that by the time the rest of the nation caught on in 1967, the best had already come and gone, and that all that was left was a circus, in San Francisco that is.

It seemed to move like a wave across the nation starting at the coasts and moving inland. As it reached farther inland, people recreated it, in their own idealized image of it, so that it actually improved with age as it swept the country.

The best thing that came out of it were the ideas. It was like a fire was set under people to get them voracious for information on other cultures, other philosophies, and a need to understand the world. This did not end but spread and grew onward through the 70's.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', ' ')They are still trying to get their hands on the $2 trillion plus in the Social Security Insurance Fund and eliminate Social Security.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')otal income to the Social Security Trust Fund from payroll taxes in 2009 was $819 billion and total expenditures (benefits and other expenses) were $683 billion, resulting in a surplus of $137 billion. The Trust Funds were credited with $116 billion in interest from earnings, which represented an effective annual rate of return of 5.1 percent. Surpluses over the past two decades built up the assets in the trust funds to $2.2 trillion at the end of 2009. These surpluses will continue for the next decade, increasing the asset amount to more than $3.9 trillion by 2018.

[Tyler_JC]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')otal income to the Social Security Trust Fund from payroll taxes in 2009 was $819 billion and total expenditures (benefits and other expenses) were $683 billion, resulting in a surplus of $137 billion. The Trust Funds were credited with $116 billion in interest from earnings, which represented an effective annual rate of return of 5.1 percent. Surpluses over the past two decades built up the assets in the trust funds to $2.2 trillion at the end of 2009. These surpluses will continue for the next decade, increasing the asset amount to more than $3.9 trillion by 2018.

[Cid_Yama]

We have already had this discussion. These are special issue securities available only to the trust fund redeemable through the Treasury. They have not and will not be redeemed. They are providing interest income to the trust fund.

They are safer than any other security in the world. They are more 'real' than anything held by any investment house or sovereign fund in the world.

Only the total collapse of the United States Government would affect their value. At which point the issue would be moot.

Just more nonsense from the right. Where's my wookie?

Public Policy Institute Primer

[Shar_Lamagne]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Darth Plantagenet', 'G')eorge Lucas isn't part of your generation.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', '.').the trust fund ... They are providing interest income to the trust fund.

[Tyler_JC]

But where do the interest payments on trust fund bonds come from?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '2')009 Social Security Trustees Report:

"Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance redemptions and interest payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public."

[Serial_Worrier]

Cid-Yama is an aging hippie?

[efarmer]

Since we are a nation teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, all the spending issues of government are going to come into question. Social welfare and the bloated global defense and protection rackets that morphed out of the constitutional national defense are going to take turns getting decimated. The people will be denied the aid and comfort of their own government before the military industrial complex is denied anything significant. But it is a seesaw and it will bob up and down until both riders are on their ass.

Foreign aid will move up to the head of the line after the first two due to it's symbolic power over voters and we will chop that down to almost nothing unless the nation in question has strategic minerals we have to have. Serious players will cut bilateral deals to keep from having to buy American military protection or pretend they are loaning us money because they are codependent with us.

Right now we are simply arguing about who takes their licks first.

I never liked Nixon but always admired his intellect for understanding the big picture. He opened up a dialogue with China, and was quoted in the early 70's as having discussed with Kissinger that the huge American world exploit was essentially over. At the time I bristled at his negativity, and then I lived through the aimless Ford and Carter years, and then saw the debt voodoo doctors line up for the descent. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and now Obama attempting to build a FrankenZombie from the body parts left over while he attempts to save himself from hordes of folks who believe a return to the practices of the 1950's will bring the 1950's back. It reminds me of the Native American Ghost Dance movement at the end of their period of independence in the 19th century.

I don't see much real merit in having competing has beens argue about which dream of once was we are going to reenact. We either make a real plan for the future with people getting realistic info about the true state of affairs or we act like an old sailor who is laid up in port smoking opium and dreaming about being a young man with the wind in his face in the tropics once again.

We either kill the fantasy or we immerse ourselves in it as a way of less painless death.

[highlander]

No the boomers really didn't go wrong. The graph might just as well be disposable income as savings.
Peak wealth occurred with peak oil in the US (discounting AK) Then, assuming growth was everlasting, our wonderful benevolent leaders hatched the great society, along with wars on all ideas and habits deemed anti-american. Since the expected growth did not occur, debt (and the enslavement of the general public) was the only possible outcome. I fear the decades from the 70's on are going to be regarded as the good old days for the forseeable future.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')color=blue]The Trust Funds were credited with $116 billion in interest from earnings, which represented an effective annual rate of return of 5.1 percent.[/color]

[Tyler_JC]

But don't you see that in order to pay the money from the SS Trust Fund they have to raise other taxes or cut other spending?

The Social Security checks will be paid, but the money will be taken from some other program.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'T')he trust fund fund ....was paid into by payroll deductions and that money belongs to those that paid into it.
.

[diemos]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tyler_JC', 'B')ut don't you see that in order to pay the money from the SS Trust Fund they have to raise other taxes or cut other spending?

The Social Security checks will be paid, but the money will be taken from some other program.