Obama and Generation X?

A few weeks ago I was at a barbecue at my wife's aunt's house. As we were chatting, the topic turned to politics. My mother in law, in her early 60s, started out by saying she wouldn't vote for Barack Obama, if he got the nomination, due to what she felt were his lack of qualifications (and race, but that's another story). When the aunt asked me, age 40, who I would vote for, I replied, "Obama. Your generation (baby boomers) have messed this country up enough." She sighed and said I sounded just like her early 20s son. Sorry about that. While the World War 2 generation held the White House for almost 30 years (JFK to Bush I), after only 16 years, it is already time for the baby boomers to pass the torch to a new generation.

So here we are, a few weeks later, and here is something I never thought I'd say, at least for another decade or two: a black man has been nominated for President by a major party (of course, if a few votes had gone the other way, I'd be saying the same thing about a woman). Not that I really care. A black candidate or a woman candidate are just symbols: what I really care about is substance. So, it is with that in mind, that I really didn't expect to write this for many years is that someone from my generation, or at least close to my age, is being nominated for President. For me, this election wasn't about a man or a woman, it became generational: Generation X versus the Baby Boomers.

Born in 1961, Barack Obama is technically a baby boomer (though some define those born in 1961 as part of Generation X), but he came of age after Vietnam, hippies, the draft etc were history. Just as John McCain, born just before WW2, was affected more by the boomers values then he was by his own generation's, so has Obama been affected by Generation X's. He himself has said it is time for a new generation to take over and remove the old, such as Bill Clinton did when he defeated George Bush, and then Bob Dole, the WWII generation. He is not weighed down by the baggage that seems to have followed the Clintons and George W. Bush. There was no draft to evade. Sampling drugs, while still not approved (obviously), were more accepted. Like many of Generation X, he grew up in a broken family and is of mixed heritage. We're the ones who understand our elders' concerns and values, and can turn our noses at their sometimes greedy ways (don't get me started on the big deficits they are leaving us as they finance their early retirements on my dime) yet are eager to embrace the technology that will define the next generation. We're also the ones who realize that we're going to have the clean up the mess baby boomers have made, paying for their retirement while hoping our job isn't outsourced. .

I liked Bill Clinton's presidency and thought Hillary would've been a decent president. However, as her campaign went on and it became negative, she reminded me why I was tired of the Clintons after the 1990s and am tired of the baby boomers in politics in general. Her campaign reminded me of all the partisan fighting that seemed to really have stemmed from the college campus "debates" of the 1960s. Enough of this already. That war is over. I'm tired of wars and fights of 40 years ago being rehashed. I'm neither liberal or conservative (best definition is I am socially liberal, but fiscally conservative -- meaning that I don't care if gays want to get married, I do care about the large debts we're leaving for our children). There seems to be a different outlook to the way things need to be done in this country that is generational. Everything is not red or blue, republican or democrat.

I don't mean to generalize an entire generation, but there is something there. For me, perhaps it is because I am tired of hypocrisy. I grew up listening to how bad Vietnam was by the same people who have now brought us Vietnam on location in Iraq. I listened to the horrors of the welfare state by my elders. I watched them vote for candidates who ended welfare, as we knew it, and, due to fiscal necessity, also eliminate some of the programs they benefited from, such as low or free college tuition. I learned to live with it. Now, however, as those same people are approaching retirement, the "me generation" is demanding that no changes be made to their special welfare program: social security, no matter the cost. They want to live off of that welfare for the next few decades, forgetting that when social security was enacted it was really for those at the end of their lives, not really healthy enough to work anymore, to spend their last few years, not decades, in relative comfort. The thing is, I've also learned to live with is a generation about to retire and, perhaps, suck social security dry. However, don't rub my face in it.

I've learned to live with the fact that social security won't be completely there, if at all, by time I retire in 25-30 years, assuming I do retire. I'm not one of those who were advocating private accounts in lieu of the current fund, primarily because I thought the only ones to really benefit would be Wall St as they made tons of money on all the fees from managing individual accounts (why was putting a portion of the trust into a few funds never really looked into anyway?). I'm not one of those demanding cuts in medicare/medicaid. But my disillusion with the way baby boomers run things goes deeper than that.

Obama is not necessarily an elitist because he tells us the truth, such as we can't keep driving our gas guzzlers, keeping our homes at 72F, while wearing our flag lapels, because the rest of the world can't support us (though you can argue Obama is being a little hypocritical himself as he is driven around in SUVs). We knew that oil is a limited resource, we should've been exploring alternatives instead of building bigger trucks over the last decade. He is not being an elitist for saying voters are bitter and turning to God because they don't believe government can help them, he is insightfully telling us what many of us already suspect.

I can see how good or bad things are. I don't need a President who will tell me everything is fine, ignore the man behind the curtain. I want a President who will, rudely if necessary, lead us back to the right path.

Retire? That's rich

A recent survey reports that that while Baby boomers are only worried about achieving a comfortable retirement, Generation X expects to work until someone wheels are our corpses away from our PCs (or whatever replaces them by then). Small wonder we don't have much pity for boomers worried that they won't be able to retire comfortably.

My wife and I have been stocking away money like mad, and have 401(k)s in the six figures, not bad for people in their late 30s. According to projections we receive from our 401k folks, we're well onour way to having enough to live on when our working days are done -- except for one little detail; it expects social security to still be around when we "retire" sometime in the mid to late 2030s. As if. I'll be happy if Medicare/Medicaid is still around and there are still doctors qualified who decide to for a career in geriatrics over plastic surgery or some other more lucrative field.

We were told by "experts" that we should invest all we can, which we've done since we started working 10-15 years ago. Our first round went bye-bye in the dot com bust, but fortunately we weren't making that much yet, so we didn't lose much. Unfortunately the chance for us to come back with the next bull market ran right into our reproductive/house buying years. So, instead of investing "discretionary" income in stocks, we bought babies, and their accessories and houses. I don't need to expand on how well the later investments are doing these days.

So, in a nutshell, those of us who were stupid enough to listen to the experts didn't do too well. Oh, we may have some money stashed away and we may have some equity in our homes but we're nowhere near where our parents were. And, now that we're approaching our 40s, we see the big social security expense coming and we feel powerless to stop it. Heaven forbid we even suggest investing the social security fund in the stock market (not as individual accounts, but just a small percentage as a whole) or raising the retirement age to account for our longer lifespans.

Sure, some of us have wasted money on things our parents didn't such as HDTVs, DVDs, cell phones, SUVs etc, that we don't need, but I'm sure my grandparents said the same thing about the color TVs my parents and their siblings purchased in the late 60s. However there are other facts aside from those discretionary purchases. We are paying much more for our homes (at the moment) then our parents did, even adjusted for inflation. While food and fuel costs, again adjusted for inflation aren't too bad at the moment, some of us are still paying our college loans (we had to go to college since the college degree somehow became our generation's high school diploma) on raises that average 3%, while contributing to our retirement, paying more for health insurance, and trying to save for our own children's college educations. That of course is assuming that our jobs aren't outsourced to India and we find ourselves working at $10 an hour McJobs.

But all that said, I can't see myself retiring for one other reason. The thought of spending the last 20 years of my life not growing, but just sitting somewhere seems incredibly dull. Oh, I don't plan to be doing what I do now, nor work as many hours, but I don't plan on doing nothing. Fortunately, unless I get some illness that affects my ability to read, write and analyze, I should be able to do some sort of work well into my golden years.

So I'm not really complaining, however, the next time I hear a retiree complain how the cost of tee time on the golf course should be reduced so they can afford to golf at the expense of something else, like parks, schools or libraries, don't be surprised if I tell the retiree where to stick the golf clubs. Same for the retirees who complain about high taxes, ignoring the little fact that if they had paid while they went, instead of voting for politicians who left huge defecits, and dealt with the corruption that has been rampant in this state for decades, their tax bills would be a bit lower.