emergent ink

Yesterday, I asked a question about the American Dream. I have been finding that people have a lot of different definitions for it. There’s one definition that I grew up with and still hold. I’ll get to it in a moment.

Yesterday, I offered the words of two individuals who are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, making statements about the American Dream. John Edwards, Democrat, liberal, and two-time ex-candidate for President of the United States, stated very clearly what his idea of the American Dream was, towards the end of an attack on Hillary Clinton during a debate earlier this year. (It comes right near the end of the video.) Edwards said that Americans

…need somebody to tell them the truth, that this system doesn’t work. Who believes that this may actually be the first generation that doesn’t leave the world and America better for our children, unlike twenty generations that came before us… The question is, will America be fine? And will we ensure—and I think this is the great moral test of our generation—will we ensure that our children will have a better life than we’ve had? That’s the responsibility we have.

It turns out that John Edwards, even with his $200+ haircuts, shares the same dream for America that I do. And I try never to spend more than $20 on my hair.

The American Dream that I grew up with is that I will be free and safe, I will have a slightly easier life than my parents, and my children’s lives will be slightly easier than my own. By slightly easier I mean that our children should be able to get a better education, have a healthier diet, be just as safe and free if not more so, and through their own hard work be able to provide the same benefits to their own children. That’s a good definition of the meaning of life, and a challenge for any person. If I could guarantee my children that much, then I will be able to say that I lived a good life.

George Will is a conservative thinker and writer. That automatically disqualifies him to speak on anything for at least half the people in this country, just as Edwards gets disqualified by just about the other half of this country. (That could be one of the killers of the American Dream, by the way.) Here’s what George Will has to say, and at first you might not realize it, but he’s talking about an American Dream. Not the one I’m talking about, though.

The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than 65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The [Wall Street] Journal grimly reported, “The prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the American dream.”

Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a universal right is a delusion of recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentality fostered by a metastasizing welfare state, Americans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a slight delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree’s adult lifetime.

In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its arithmetic ruthlessly: When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was 65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today’s retirement age would be 75.

That’s a rather cold way to put it. Clear thought sometimes seems that way. But Will is, in his own way, asking the same question that Edwards asked: will our children have better lives than we have? Will believes that is our responsibility, just as much as Edwards does.

If the retirement age was indexed to life expectancy, the Social Security system would not be doomed to collapse. Like George Will, I don’t ever plan to run for higher office, so I can get away with saying that. Politicians can’t, though.

Politicians can’t talk about Social Security in that way, or talk about the world we are leaving our children, in a way that would lead to effective action, a scary but truthful way, because doing so would upset the overlarge and too selfish generation of baby boomers that are the cause of the problem. Social Security is just the start of it.

Look at the cover of AARP magazine, or better yet, go to their website (www.aarp.org). You’ll find ads for Travelocity, an interactive tool to calculate whether you’re ready for retirement, more travel discounts, something about the joys of driving a convertible and something else about a rock and roll fantasy camp. Also, ways you can contact your elected officials. AARP has to be the largest lobbying group in this country. The menu that runs across the top of the site gives all these active aging boomers their choices: Health, Money, Leisure, Make a Difference, Family, Online Community, and Membership. The Family section has subsections called Grandparenting, Caregiving, Housing Options, Life After Loss, and Love & Relationships.

I’m on the very tail end of the boomer generation, meaning I’m the one who is going to feel what happens when Social Security collapses. I’m not too worried about that; I gave up worrying about my own benefits in the 80s. The thing that worries me is what the generations that follow my own are going to do with me. That Family section has some important topics for me and people like me. But for most baby boomers, AARP seems to be saying that Family comes after Health, Money, and Leisure. Even Volunteering comes before Family.

George Will said that “the idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a universal right is a delusion of recent vintage.” AARP encourages this delusion. Earlier generations were content to be part of an extended household, sharing in the raising of the grandchildren. Now, we have atomic families, fission families, and the grandparents are ‘away’ in Florida or a retirement home that’s more local.

What do you get when the grandparents are gone, and both parents are working, or one of them has moved out? You get what you deserve. Not what the kids deserve, though.

This gap between retirement and death (thanks to the benefits of modern medicine, increasing and healthier life expectancies), and the way aging baby boomers have commandeered the American dream as theirs, and theirs only, to enjoy in endless travel and play long after their parents and grandparents did, has to be paid for. Social Security won’t cover it, so over the past few decades the baby boomers have worked out a couple of alternatives.

The first of these is the stock market. Mutual funds, 401(k) plans, and the like are designed to fund our retiring boomers’ increasingly active and expensive lifestyles. So the stock market must go up. Companies, to become more profitable, ship jobs overseas. This has a lesser impact over time on the boomers, who are in positions that make these decisions, but it has a big impact on their children. Boomers pay for their travel through the profits they make on Wal*Mart stock going up, and their children get to work there. For those boomers that missed the boat on these investments, well, Wal*Mart’s got jobs for them, too. And the stuff sold there is so… cheap. Right in line with what you can afford, when you work at Wal*Mart. It all works out in the end, doesn’t it?

Americans are consumers; that’s the part left for them in this world where all the manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and all that’s left is something called a ‘service economy’ consisting of work that is far out of the way of the food chain. By that I mean that many of us work to earn money, and use that money to buy things like food, shelter, and water. We used to be able to provide those things for ourselves. The only thing that we absolutely need for survival, that we don’t pay for yet, is air.

We also use that money we earn to buy a car, insure it, and fuel it, because without that car, we would have no money to buy food, shelter, and water.

For Americans to be good consumers, we have to have money to spend on things. If we’re not buying things, then the companies that make them (overseas) are not making money, and that’s bad for our stock portfolios and our future retirements. The other alternative was the equity built up over the years, as the price of the family home went up and the mortgage got paid off. So Americans took the equity that had built up in their homes, cashed it in, made some home improvements (which benefitted Home Depot stockholders), and started the real estate boom.

The real estate boom that started in the 90s and, after a long run with a small setback along the way, is coming to a vicious end, had one good effect: more people than ever before owned their own homes. Prices were unrealistically high, but as long as they kept going up, then you could stay ahead of the reaper by flipping your home for another one. Many people ended up in homes bigger than they should have bought, having put less of a down payment on them, and owing a lot more than they could manage in the long run. But as long as things kept going the way they were, nobody was going to complain. It was, in some ways, a pyramid scheme.

Many of the ‘service’ jobs that were created as part of this are now going away. A lot of people that thought they had futures in real estate or mortgages are in trouble, especially since much of that work depends on commissions.

At the very top of the pyramid, you have the financial ‘industry’ which doesn’t actually make anything, and which, if Bear Stearns serves as an example, can also disappear rather quickly.

(Yes, I realize that the ads that appear on this site only encourage the sort of thing I’m complaining about. Internet advertising is all about keywords, not context. And no, I do not believe all baby boomers have fallen for this delusion and are the cause of our problems. The issues are more complicated, but it would take an entry much longer than this to go into even a small part of them.)

The good news about all of this is that, if we do go over the edge into what looks (from this side) to be a catastrophic economic collapse, lots of people are going to get the chance to work in manufacturing again, thought it might not be manufacturing the way we had gotten used to thinking about it. It will be a lot closer to the food chain, though. And we may yet see the return of the extended family, if only out of necessity. How we live up to our responsibility for the generation that follows is the only test that matters.

One thing’s for sure about the next generation: it’s going to be in for some shocks of its own. Certain things they have taken for granted may not turn out the way they expected, the way they were promised it would be. And I’m not talking about that stock-trading baby in that E*Trade commercial.