Fatherhood Friday
On this Black Friday, I've been pondering a usual topic of interest: intergenerational relationships. In fact, this has been on my mind for the past few weeks in a much broader context than family and holidays. But first, let's stick with Thanksgiving.
In what perhaps is a testament to having very low expectations and then quite happily exceeding them, I really was not looking forward to Thanksgiving this year. Flying from the Midwest to the East Coast with two young children (one in a stroller) in the Year of the TSA Grope seemed less adventurous and more stress-inducing. Gladly, the airport experience on both ends of the flight couldn't have been any smoother.
This was indeed an auspicious beginning to Thanksgiving, where we got together with four generations of family and extended family. The best part about it was seeing my kids and my sister's kids spending time with their great-grandmother.
As I watched them it got me thinking about the various generations and the hope that each generation has that the next lives a better economic life. For my grandmother's generation - the Greatest Generation - there seems to be little doubt that they made the sacrifices and accomplishments that allowed their kids, the Baby Boomers, to do so. Some of the Greatest Generation efforts trickled on down one more generation to Gen X, and while some of the next generation (my kids' generation) has some opportunity before them, it seems that I'm hearing all the time how for the first time ever Americans are NOT confident that the next generation will live a better life than the one before it.
Notice that I didn't say that the Baby Boomers created a better economic world for their kids. While they certainly made significant contributions to improve the well-being of the country and planet, I feel like the younger generations (X, Y and beyond) have in some ways been sacrificed by them in their selfish pursuit of economic success.
All of the policies and tax structures seem in place to ensure their perpetual growth. Two examples. The first is Social Security. There is general agreement that changes will need to be made - a combination of increasing taxes and decreasing benefits. Well, guess whose taxes are going up and whose benefits are going down? Its not the Boomers. If you read between the lines of any prescriptions being discussed, the real pain will come after the Boomers have maxed the system and left their kids to pay the bills.
The other is the mortgage deduction. President Obama's debt reduction taskforce recently came out with a number of recommendations. There's a lot of things for a lot of people not to like in their, and I'm glad that at the very least the conversation has started. The piece that irked me was the reduction or phasing out of the mortgage deduction. If followed through, there was one generation that would have benefited completely from it: the Baby Boomers. But for those of us at the beginning or middle of home ownership - Gen X & Gen Y - the Boomers are willing to take that benefit away. So that their social security doesn't get reduced.
Its obviously more complex than that (for example, personal benefit aside I think there are merits to discussing the impact of the mortgage deduction) but the fact is I feel like we're in the middle of an unprecedented transfer of wealth. We've always had wealth transfers, but I'm not aware of any time where its been so overwhelmingly from our youngest to our oldest.
Photo credit: sessionsimpressions.blogspot.com
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