The great baby-boomer retirement wave is upon us. According to Census Bureau data, 44% of boomers are at retirement age and millions more are soon to join them. By 2030, the largest generation to enter retirement will all be older than 65.
The general assumption is that boomers will have a comfortable retirement. Coasting on their accumulated wealth from three decades as America's dominant economic force, boomers will sail off into their golden years to sip on margaritas on cruises and luxuriate in their well-appointed homes. After all, Federal Reserve data shows that while the 56 million Americans over 65 make up just 17% of the population, they hold more than half of America's wealth — $96.4 trillion.
But there's a flaw in the narrative of a sunny boomer retirement: A lot of older Americans are not set up for their later years. Yes, many members of the generation are loaded, but many more are not. Like every age cohort, there's significant wealth inequality among retirees — and it's gotten worse in the past decade. Despite holding more than half of the nation's wealth, many boomers don't have enough money to cover the costs of long-term care, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022. That year, 30% of people over 65 were economically insecure, meaning they made less than $27,180 for a single person. And since younger boomers are less financially prepared for retirement than their older boomer siblings, the problem is bound to get worse.
As boomers continue to age out of the workforce, it's going to put strain on the healthcare system, government programs, and the economy. That means more young people are going to be financially responsible for their parents, more government spending will be allocated to older folks, and economic growth could slow.
I think one of the things you're saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person's or any one group's control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it "the kids are puritan pilled." And of course even that's not true for all of them. We're all products of the world in which we live and it's easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.