Interesting story … but lets put the blame where the blame lies …
The first (of 450) comments on this story reflect my sentiments exactly:
Nice story about my generation. I would add that in my working, tax-paying life, I paid social security and medicare taxes that supported both my grandparents (and other blood relatives of the their generation, born in the last years of the 19th century) and both my parents. They all received benefits far in excess of their contributions to Social Security and Medicare. Also, it was their generations that passed/adopted/voted for the Presidents, Senators, and Representatives who created the entitlements that exist today. I was 15 in 1965 and obviously not yet born in the 1930s. As a nation we can no longer afford to provide the benefits my grandparents and patents received, financed by my labor and taxes on my wages, but your tale is short-sighted when you describe mine as the entitlement generation.
(emphasis mine)
What the writer doesn’t say is that the vast majority (if not all) his female elder relatives often didn’t contribute to the “system” at all, yet collected SS until the day they died.
He’s absolutely right. We supported the gens before us because that is what the SS (OASDI) “system” was in place for. Now it is our turn to be on the “receiving end,” except for one caveat. We boomers (male AND female) DID (involuntarily for decades) put substantial portions of our pay into it. A good portion of us actually maxed out our SS contributions to the maximum allowable by law. It is now our turn to collect (hopefully most or all of the “corpus” or principal) of our “contributions” back out … forget any potential “interest” we could have made on the money.
Suck it up and deal with it. We boomers did so why are Gen X/Y whining about this now?
