The Generational Blind Spot-BOOM!

Originally Posted by trumptman

Some of you have heard my "boomer rants" and may have grown tired of them, but the reality is not only here, it is here with a vengence.

As an investor I've always been a bit of a contrarian and one bit of advice I remember reading involved when to act on bad news. The news would first be whispers in opinion pages or by columnists involved with the sector. Then the bad news would progressively get worse until it made the front page of the associated section, say lead story about copper in the commodities section of the finance journals. Finally it might make the front page of the business news but that still wasn't proof the news had arrived. It is when mainstreet wakes up to it and it leads the nightly news that you know the opportunity has finally arrived and is here.

So guess what... boom, inflation is here.

When Michael Kinsley is writing about it for the pages of Time, it isn't something we reckon is going to happen, or something people are whispering might happen. It is happening, it is conventional wisdom, it is a done deal. It isn't a left or right thing or even a political thing. It is the consummation of how a generation has done business and it is the front pages acknowledging how they plan on handling the endgame. Three words describe it perfectly, pump it up.



You cannot get better terms on broke. We do not have a liquidity crisis, we have an insolvency crisis. The U.S. consumer is broke. The nation is bankrupt. The government is thinking about running trillion dollar a year deficits all to try to make the bubbles come back.

So the generational reckoning is here and the solution is to lie, cheat and steal. As the article notes there isn't another side to this equation. As people of all political stripes have noted over the years with the boomer generation it doesn't matter the values. They all have abandoned them in this generation. The bar is lower. It isn't whether you cheated on your wife. It is if you cheated on her while she was recovering or dying from cancer.

So now the bar is so low that we print away the debt for the debtors and crush the savers all in hopes of doing this all again, being able to say we are wealthy without generating any real wealth. I mean what else can you expect from them. They couldn't get the house refied for another 30 years now that they are 60 years old. They could slow down, spend less, try to save and work off their bad lifestyle of drinking, drugs, obesity, smoking and an overall worse state of health coming into retirement than the prior generation. They could finally grow up, pay their own way and stop making up new lies. Instead it is down to the ultimate lie. The currency itself will be manipulated to cover up their lifetime of nonsense.

They are down to the proverbial last straw. They have stolen all they can from the future so now it is time to change the rules of the game. The new rule is there are no rules and we are a bunch of thieves. We don't just bread up the meat and water down the drinks. We already tried that. Now it is simply time to stick you up and take all you have.

I hope you have some inflation hedges (and I don't mean TIPS) so you can enjoy the ride. Try to keep the filling in your teeth as we watch the boomers scramble like mad before having to deal with reality.

Originally Posted by trumptman

They could slow down, spend less, try to save and work off their bad lifestyle of drinking, drugs, obesity, smoking and an overall worse state of health coming into retirement than the prior generation.

Originally Posted by trumptman

I looked for a common cause and found it, they are boomers acting like boomers.

Originally Posted by trumptman

you have realize that 1/6th of that is what Obama is expected to spend on a RING for Michelle Obama. That is what the RNC spent on the family for the entire political season. Everything the Republicans did was small change this year. Obama blew the doors off for raising and spending money.

Originally Posted by trumptman

Dude, regardless of the biases you have realize that 1/6th of that is what Obama is expected to spend on a RING for Michelle Obama. That is what the RNC spent on the family for the entire political season. Everything the Republicans did was small change this year. Obama blew the doors off for raising and spending money.

If the data are objectively assessed, which age-slice of today's working-age adults really does deserve to be called the dumbest generation?

The answer may surprise you. No, it's not today's college-age kids, nor even today's family-starting 30-somethings. And no, it's not the 60-year-olds who once grooved at Woodstock. Instead, it's Americans in their 40s, especially their late 40s -- those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They straddle the boundary line between last-wave boomers and first-wave Generation Xers. The political consultant Jonathan Pontell labels them "Generation Jones."

Whatever you call them (I'll just call them early Xers), the numbers are clear: Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they're the dumbest.

Obviously, we're talking averages. No one would apply the word "dumb" to Barack Obama (born in 1961) or Timothy F. Geithner, his nominee for secretary of the Treasury (born in the same month). Yet the president-elect himself has written eloquently about how hard it was for him and his peers to obtain a serious education during their dazed-and-confused teen years. Like it or not, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (born in 1964), who stumbled over basic civics facts during her vice presidential run, is more representative of this group. Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught.

Originally Posted by trumptman

You keep blaming one person Jimmac, but Republican or Democrat, it is boomers who keep electing people who want to create bubbles. It is boomers who believe, and always have believed, that the rules don't apply to them. It doesn't matter if we are talking about boomers with mortgages in default or boomers who run the banks and gave them the loans, or boomers who lobbied for the law changes.

I've lived through both parties being in power and also across the change in power from one generation to another. After I got tired of wondering why Republicans didn't act like Republicans and Democrats didn't act like Democrats I looked for a common cause and found it, they are boomers acting like boomers.

Let me give you a little heads up. I've already stated that Obama won't end Pax Americana. So far you have an "anti-war" candidate who was preceded by a Congress who vowed to end the war, use PAYGO to stop new spending, reform earmarks, end the Bush tax cuts and use the savings from ending the war and wasteful spending to balance the budget or at least get it a lot closer to balance.

It is 2008 and the war isn't ended, not a single thing was done about it. PAYGO is gone. Earmarks are still here. The tax cuts are still not being ended and now we are having a race to see who can be first to pass the most half a trillion dollar packages.

Now let's take this to Obama. The oil windfall tax is already off the table. Ending Bush tax cuts is off the table. We know he voted for FISA and now wants to deploy 20,000 troops domestically to "protect us." All those terrible Democratic Senators who were "fooled" by Bush and thus did not have his judgment, they are his cabinet. You know... folks like Clinton, Daschle, Biden, etc.

Obama is planning spending that will make Bush look small time. They are admitting they will simply print the cost away. That is amazing. By they I don't mean the administration, but Boomer media surrogates are admitting it because it is indefensible and besides the election is over so they can fess up.



Isn't being unable to execute a search properly the first sign of Alzheimer's? I look forward to your response presuming you can remember the board url and your log in details.



They have had it you are right, but the boomers are the first generation coming in so unhealthy that they will likely lower our life expectancy due to those health factors. So understand that people did do all those things in the past and died much earlier as a result. As we learned about their harm, we educated ourselves and took steps to change behaviors and extended our life expectancy as a result. Boomers are the first generation coming into retirement that will be LESS HEALTHY than the prior generation. So maybe great-grandpa smoked and had whisky with his dinner and lived to be 74. Grandpa coming after is the first one in several generations that we expect to live less time due to health issues.

Maybe they traded smoking for eating, or maybe the ten years of drug abuse they gave up that great-grandpa never had are taking a toll. The point is the boomers are the first generation for whom this is happening. A lot of it is probably women adopting all the bad habits that used to be reserved for men. So the man of the house smoked while the "lady" did not and now the "liberated" women of the 60's have smoke, drank and drugged with their male contemporaries, but again, as a generation they are expected to be in worse shape, possibly have lower life expectancy and finally require more money to maintain quality of life, than the previous generation.



Culture is truly never more than a generation deep. If one generation rejects the previous culture and adopts a new one and that new one is ruinous, that generation should be blamed. During WWII we had government debt but it was owned by Americans via savings bonds. Now it is owned by the Chinese and Japanese. We went from the world's biggest savers to the world's biggest debtor nation and not just with regard to government but collectively as people in our personal decisions as well. The generation that engaged in that, I do blame them for their own actions.



Dude, regardless of the biases you have realize that 1/6th of that is what Obama is expected to spend on a RING for Michelle Obama. That is what the RNC spent on the family for the entire political season. Everything the Republicans did was small change this year. Obama blew the doors off for raising and spending money.



I personally like rental property. My cheapest rental unit was $485 in 2001. Now it is $700. The dollars have diluted but my spending power is the same. Pick what is right for you.

Obama is planning spending that will make Bush look small time.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

You may be right, but...



...is this the generation of dumb? Boomers? No. This generation after them (b. 1960 Yay me!) will be the deciding factor as to whether this country or the world will fall. Call me stupid, but I'd chose Obama over Palin in the White House over all.

And fuck trumptman, he's not even president yet. Get a grip on reality. It's much worse than we all think, and we will just have to see what he will do. There has been no president with more on his agenda than at any time in history.

Also, there is a lot more to this article I cited, that the fact being that the younger generations are getting better test scores, but what will their future hold? I don't know.

Originally Posted by jimmac

I believe boomers go from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1953 so you and I are late ones.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

I find all these "Gen" labels and terms dubious to say the least.

But I think much of the younger generation see that whatever the Baby Boomers are doing they take a different route. It is a bad move to follow the trends of the largest demographic lump in America.

Originally Posted by trumptman

Isn't being unable to execute a search properly the first sign of Alzheimer's? I look forward to your response presuming you can remember the board url and your log in details.

Originally Posted by trumptman

Well I would say thanks for the half compliment but I don't know who you were for the last seven years.



First I was born in 1970 and I don't really get what calling yourself dumb adds to the discussion. Finally it doesn't have to do with Obama saying his oath. We can already see two years of broken Democratic promises and the legislation lining up waiting for Obama's signature.

Bernarke, Paulson, Bush, all of them totally abandoned free market principles when it was their asses on the line. Those coming after them don't appear to have any free market principles to abandon. Sure it sucks that Republicans abandoning conservative principles, things like balancing budgets and limiting power and reach of the government including trying to be the cop for the world sucks. It sucks hard. That doesn't mean that those coming next don't have a clear agenda they are going to act on and it is huge.

The auto bailout is a great example. The real issue is benefits and costs. The big three have become benefits distributors who happen to make cares. Japanese companies manage to make high quality cars using American workers but do not have the historical UAW contract requirements. The solution from the Dems, subsidize the unions and make greener cars. I love greener cars. I bought a very nice Ford Escort this year that now costs me $20 a week to fill with our nice low gas prices. But greener and more efficient cars won't change the pension and medical benefit costs that are unsustainable. Saying that we can give money if they will make more efficient cars doesn't make the benefits sustainable. We will throw money after a good intention but not a good solution.



First SDW isn't in here and I don't know what he has to do with this. Second, Jesus dude, you don't have to work so hard to demonstrate the blind spot. The entire modus operandi for the generation is "at least we are trying to do something positive even though we continue to choose selfish, fucked up solutions." Hey I divorced your mom and now we are both too broke to save for retirement and we ran up the credit cars and tapped out the 401k setting up two separate households. "At least we are trying to do something positive with something negative." That sums up the entire generation. They do what they want claiming good intentions and guess what selfish, fucked up shit is selfish, fucked up shit even with a good intention. The bill is coming due for all the bullcrap.






Yes, well for now the CHANGE™ is for the 60's to come roaring back and for utopia to be here via legislative fiat.

We can already see two years of broken Democratic promises and the legislation lining up waiting for Obama's signature.

Yes, well for now the CHANGE™ is for the 60's to come roaring back and for utopia to be here via legislative fiat.

First SDW isn't in here

Originally Posted by jimmac

I believe boomers go from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1953 so you and I are late ones.

Originally Posted by jimmac

Well why do you think we had the big conservative surge starting with the Reagan years? Young republicans doing the opposite of their " Hippy " parents. It's the way things work. Now here we are at the other end of the pendulum. One can only hope that in all this swinging back and forth that positive progress is made. And remember the stronger the swing ( and the worse the fuck up ) the stronger the swing in the other direction. Action / reaction.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

Heh. Interesting. Because when I was in my 20's and Reagan went into office, I was listening to this.

Probably because my parents weren't hippies? Neither were my brothers and sisters.

But I was hanging around with hippies, punks and bikers. Oh woe was me, being different.

Originally Posted by e1618978

I think that it is reasonable to categorize the baby boomers as being different from other generations. They vastly outnumbered their parents and children, and grew up in an artificially wealthy post-war boom period.

The power (both voting and economic) that their numbers gave them (at every age) made them more self-centered and entitled than they would normally have become. Some time that had good results (the civil rights movement), and sometimes not so much (voting themselves rights to take more out of the social security pot than they had to put in, and all the havoc that their failure to save for retirement is causing, etc).

The baby boomers have their own distinct characteristics, and it isn't the equivalent of racism when you point that out.

Boomers who have run record national debt levels all while saving nothing will be given the option of moving to someplace like Mexico to get by (they can send us workers, we can send them retirees) or they can enjoy the true silver bullet solution, a literal bullet.

Originally Posted by franksargent

Boomers who have run record national debt levels all while saving nothing will be given the option of moving to someplace like Mexico to get by (they can send us workers, we can send them retirees) or they can enjoy the true silver bullet solution, a literal bullet.

Originally Posted by e1618978

Who is the quote from? And do you disagree when I say that the boomer generation is different from other generations? They seem pretty different to me.

Or do you agree that they are different, but think it is taboo to say so? What is your position?

Originally Posted by franksargent

Tweeners ripping on boomers. I get it!

I think we ought to kill everyone in AmeriKKKa under the age of 55, and replace them with the people of Canada, Mexico, China, India, and the country of Africa.

Originally Posted by e1618978

Are you going to answer my question, or continue to evade it?

For some of this generation, Generation X thinking has significant overtones of cynicism against things held dear to the previous generations, mainly the Baby Boomers.[13]

Shockingly, there are now 31.6 million people who use food stamps in the United States - that's 1 in 10 Americans unable to feed themselves. There have been more than 1.2 million jobs lost over the past 3 months, the 11th straight month of job losses, making the unemployment rate to 6.7 per cent, the highest in 15 years.

Originally Posted by franksargent

rant, including many generational generalizations

Originally Posted by e1618978

So you agree with me that it is OK to notice that the different generations have different characteristics? I am almost a baby boomer, btw - born in 1967. I'm gen-X and my wife is a baby boomer.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

Heh. Interesting. Because when I was in my 20's and Reagan went into office, I was listening to this.

Probably because my parents weren't hippies? Neither were my brothers and sisters.

But I was hanging around with hippies, punks and bikers. Oh woe was me, being different.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

Boom, boom, out go the lights.

Originally Posted by trumptman

You keep telling yourself it is all about Bush and not all about power and a corrupt generation. The fact that we can already name so many "corrupt" Democrats and they haven't even fully assumed power at the federal level yet bespeaks the fact that our choice is between corrupt and more corrupt, big and bigger spender. Unless of course you think the names Spitzer, Blagojevich, Jefferson, and Rangel inspire trust.



I'm sure the "spirit" will make those kids hand over 80% of their gross income to fund your Social Security. Keep hope alive Jimmac! I'm sure trillion dollar deficits will inspire those kids plenty. I assure you it can and will get much worse. In my economic posts, I've gone on about how we don't have a liquidity crisis, we have an insolvency crisis much like how we don't have a health care crisis, we have a health crisis.

You can't get better loan terms on broke.

Just like with health care, we haven't invented a pill yet that fixes "won't stop smoking, overeating and sitting on my ass." That isn't a health care crisis, it is a health crisis.



Bush has his share but you ignore the pile of crap claiming the person who put the last bucket of shit on it really is why it stinks. Bush may have added a drug benefit to an already unsustainable medicare and social security entitlement, but it is still unsustainable and Democrats still wanted to add more. Bush may have spent another two trillion onto the deficit but we appear to now be calling that number the first hundred days of an Obama administration.

Really Jimmac, stop tossing up crap and condemn a principle if it is bad. If running up a deficit is bad, then condemn Obama when he doesn't even address. Condemn the Democrats when they ACCELERATE the deficit spending. Do some thinking and stop jerking that knee and chanting Bush over and over again.

Also how does one prove a generation better? If we manage to get by with less and survive after your generation has spent the nation into a crater and will soon inflate and destroy the currency to try to cover the lie up does that make the next generation better? If we manage to make it to 80 with no health care after you made it to 81 demanding knee and hip replacements along with a slew of pills per day does that make us better or worse? What is the measurement?



It may be cyclic with your generation wavering between two or three choices, but the reality is that the generation that follow might be left with no choices. I also think you've got the Reagan revolution totally mischaracterized. Gorden Gecko wasn't a young kid. He was and is a boomer. Like most boomers though they grabbed the right values, but lied and changed the rules. It is the rule for this generation. You don't like the rules you lie and change them. More taxes for thee and not for me. They let their parents foot the bills through the 60's and 70's and up their deficits and now they want us to all understand that raising taxes is patriotic just as soon as they retire from their prime earning years and start collecting Social Security.



Exactly and you note some of the factors that lead to this blindspot I speak about.



I never said they were bad people because they were old. I said they were bad all along. That means they were bad when they were young too Frank.

Of course it isn't nearly that clear cut but I make word choices stark when someone is tossing up a lot of dust and gets into their "all his ideas are hate and thus don't need to be engaged" mode of thinking which pretty much describes most discussions with you. I guess I have gone from AmeriKKKa to AmAARPca. Care to explain why mere disagreement with you is always hate? Got any exploding pumpkins to post?



The quote is from me and it is from a post discussing assisted suicide.



What you don't realize is you already did do that. Your generation was too selfish to fuck and one of the suggested solution to the fact that no one will be around to fund your retirement is massive immigration. This is why, amazingly enough all those boomer politicians, regardless of party are such open border proponents when most of their constituents are not.



He'll probably post some flaming pumpkins, some more off-topic photos or perhaps and map showing the distribution of hate groups in the U.S.



Oh see..... I was right on that guess.



We have a record number of food stamp users because this country is giving out, giving in, getting ready to go away. It is a spent and empty shell. We could reverse Pax Americana, end the inflation of the dollar, begin living within our means, etc. but that would require the generation with the most votes to grow up. It won't happen.

Speaking of news sources, I was reading the Huffington Post and did you notice as I did that the "examples" in that story are almost all boomers having retirement problems? We have an entire generation entering their retirement years with little to no assets. They spent them on the drug years, the wandering years, the free love didn't stop us from divorcing years, the I lost a bundle realizing manipulation isn't creation of products years, the internet bubble doesn't change the rules years and now on the granite counter-tops can't fund my retirement years.

A depleted 401k, if they even have one in the first place, that was only ever inflated in the first place through manipulation, while owning less of or even being flipped on their new mortgage that they took out at 55 and then losing their job and spending half a decade burning through savings looking for another similar job instead of waking up to reality means these folks are coming into retirement flat busted and it is from a lifetime of choices, not just George Bush.

Sure the kids after them are late twentyish to thirtyish and probably still haven't even bought a house because they have $100k in student loans because boomers told them they would need a college degree to be a waitress at T.G.I.F's after shipping the good jobs overseas, but still none of that will fix the squandered wealth that was and is the boomer generation.



He won't agree. Disagreement with Frank is a hate crime. There is no better personification of my claim that social justice concerns can override reality. He is demonstrating the boomer blind spot. Reality, I can ignore that because I've found a social injustice I think is important.



See what I mean?

I called Frank and Jimmac to discuss this with them on the phone. The outcome wasn't good.

You keep telling yourself it is all about Bush and not all about power and a corrupt generation.

Originally Posted by trumptman

Yeah I don't get it. The guy who won has the same Secretary of Defense, appointed all the Senators who were deluded into voting for it for his cabinet and now he wants to put his own name on the half a trillion dollar bail out packages.

So much has changed.... Now instead of Democrat-lite, we've got Democrat Classic.

The perception of Generation X during the late 1980s was summarized in a featured article in Time Magazine[15] (1990):
. . .They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix . . .This is the twenty-something generation, those 48 million young Americans ages 18 through 29 who fall between the famous baby boomers and the boomlet of children the baby boomers are producing. Since today's young adults were born during a period when the U.S. birthrate decreased to half the level of its postwar peak, in the wake of the great baby boom, they are sometimes called the baby busters. By whatever name, so far they are an unsung generation, hardly recognized as a social force or even noticed much at all...By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle and impractical. While the baby boomers had a placid childhood in the 1950s, which helped inspire them to start their revolution, today's twenty-something generation grew up in a time of drugs, divorce and economic strain. . .They feel influenced and changed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.[1]
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