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Will baby boomers ever be able to retire?Op-Ed by Gini Crawford, MSW
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Spending money you don’t have is bad enough but our government is doing something even worse. They are now spending money they don’t have on things that don’t particularly work, or are not needed or wanted. If a person was doing this, we would call them reckless or out of control. I would venture to say, our government is too! An example of this comes from what I just read in Sen. Tom Coburn’s report, 100 ways the stimulus money is being used. Below is one of the hundred. Road signs costing $300 each are being placed at construction sites to alert motorists that the project is being paid for by stimulus money. Signs are popping up all across America. In Illinois alone, the signs are expected to cost $150,000, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). According to an IDOT spokesman, “It's difficult for us to determine how many signs there will be.” For some reason this one struck me as the so-called poster child of wasteful government spending. At the bottom of each sign they should have to state, “This $300 sign was printed by the Obama administration to show off government waste.” I figure this useless government spending is costing the taxpayers at the very least 5 million. Just imagine how else your tax dollar could have been spent. Here is a novel idea – saving so the baby boomers will be able to retire by 70. It’s like they are flushing our hard earned money down the toilet. |
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If the signs weren’t enough to get you outraged about government misuse of our tax dollars, there is an issue about the national debt that will. This issue seems to be a scenario that no politician wants to deal with. Below is a comment from the Independence Institute about the real national debt.
The $11 trillion figure often referred to as our “national debt” is misleading. The $11 trillion does not take into consideration what the government owes to meet the liabilities it is legally required to meet, such as civilian and military retirement benefits. The $11 trillion figure also does not take into account federal entitlements like Social Security and Medicare benefits the government has promised to pay out. They are obligations to which the government has committed for which there are currently no funds. These unfunded liabilities make up a significant percentage of the “real” national debt which has now reached an astounding $56.4 trillion. With increasing numbers of baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security and Medicare and the pool of taxpayers decreasing, these unfunded liabilities will continue to increase and so will the “real” national debt barring any policy changes. David Walker, who served as Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office from 1998-2008, suggests that our country is legally bankrupt because the “real” national debt figure is so large. That is, our liabilities are larger than our assets. http://www.i2i.org/main/page.php?page_id=249
The reality is, this debt is on the backs of every person in America including future generations. Since America’s population is over 300,000,000 and our debt is about 56 trillion (I have heard figures that are much higher) that means each person owes about $188,000 - more than most people owe on their home!
As a baby-boomer, I have always thought Medicare and Social Security would probably not help us enormously in our retirement. But I had no idea how in debt our country would be, with no solution in sight, at the time my generation was hitting the system. The question all baby-boomers should be asking is, “How will our generation retire or even survive financially?”
It is obvious our government is not dealing with this coming nightmare. They are acquiring more debt even as you read this, which is making the problem worse. It’s pretty obvious, there really isn’t any easy answer to this. However like any problem you need to solve, if you are willing to look at it in a truthful light, you can at least start dealing with it, and hopefully come up with a solution. As Americans we need to ask our politicans how they plan to deal with this situation? My husband and I just figure we will go from working to our coffin, but let’s hope our leaders can come up with a better solution than ours.
Our Vice President just informed a group from AARP if we don’t spend more money as a nation we will be bankrupt. This can be found in the article by Penny Starr, We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt. (from CNSNews.com). I thought that was how you go bankrupt, spending more money than you have and not being able to pay it back. It’s obvious America needs better leaders.
©2009 by Virginia (Gini) Crawford, MSW - All Rights Reserved
