The Elephant in the Corner

After reading the morning shift on one of my favorite blog sites Jalopnik, I was startled by a piece of information.  "The median family net worth in the United States is down to the levels of the 1990s."  Well that sucks.  I am not very surprised considering we are in the middle (or beginning) of a recession, and there has not been any good news about the global economy in years.  But, this does point out a major problem I see in the economic future.  


I'll start by explaining that this is all the Baby Boomers faults.  They decided that having 10 children was a great idea, and it can be when you are trying to grow a work force, but other generations pay the price.  Namely, my generation.  We are one of the upcoming generations that will pay into social security but we won't see a dime of it.  Basically we are paying to take care of other people on the vague promise that one day someone will take care of us.  Well they won't. 


What problem does this cause?  Well first of all, we are in lean times, which means wages are down but prices are up on almost everything but houses.  That combined with the fact that we have to start thinking about retirement at a much earlier age, and we have to pay into social security means that our wages are garnished even further.  Don't get me wrong I believe that planning for retirement early is great and a lot of our older generations would have been better served to plan early.  But, wage matching programs are more of a hindrance than a help.  Just pay me my damn money, don't fool me into thinking that I'm getting a bonus by differing 5% of paycheck so that you'll match some of it according to some mathematical equation that involves Sine and Cosine. 


What has happened is that more wages are being differed until later, and more wages are being taken out earlier.  This reduces the amount of take home income a person has.  It also reduces the amount of investments that a person can make.


We are heading towards an inevitable dead end.  Student loans will eventually bust as older people are working longer thus there are less jobs.  Everything is becoming more expensive, including groceries, gas, bills, etc. reducing the amount of available income.  The housing market is royally fucked because the only ones that can afford to buy are investors keeping good homes out of hard working peoples hands.


I don't know what the solution to the problem is, but I do know that there are far more problems than people are alluding to. Maybe instead of businesses and the government trying to reduce salaries, maybe they should try to increase them and quit bitching about how the budget sucks and no one wants to work (in fact no one does want to work for peanuts).