From today’s Globe And Mail:
Not all boomers are as lucky as we were. I know plenty of folks (especially women) who can’t afford to retire and need every cent of Old Age Security they’ll get. Yet I also know that lots of younger people won’t have it as good as we did. You want a union job at a car plant? You’ll make a lot less than your elders do, and you will never catch up. The airline industry will never pay what it once did either. Students today typically graduate with $25,000 worth of debt, then take a few more years to latch on to the job market. The modest house my mom helped me buy now costs a modest fortune.
Full column here.
I. Am. Stunned. I agreed with every word in this article. I never read MW. When I finally get around to cancelling my Globe and Mail subscription in the near future, it’ll be mostly because of the editorial board’s pro-Stephen Harper bullshit, but Wente’s oft-myopic columns play a role, too. Not this one, though.
Is this some kind of early April Fool’s joke? No, seriously?
Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Wente recognizes the role Canada’s rich-people-friendly governments of the last 30 years had in this generational robbery. She probably believes that changing global economics and some kind of magical historical inevitability are the big reasons the post-boomer generations are screwed (check out her snide dismissal of social democratic policy here). She’s wrong. Our interests have been deliberately attacked with calculated policy choices by business-controlled puppets from Mulroney to Chretien to Paul Martin to, worst of all, Stephen Harper.
The rich keep getting richer. It’s obviously not an accident. The problem is clearly plutocracy.
But still, her observation of the details, if not the causes, is bang on this time.
It’s too little, too late, but damn, Margaret Wente sure nailed it today.
Wente often tells it like it is regarding the generation-income-inequality-gap. Often, though, yes, she is just sucking up to Charles Adler.
I have never voted for the “Cons”,especially the reformer-alliance version.
Yer right , its been all plutocracy more so now(x10), since the Mulman’s years.
Think Wente was trying to make the point that you are responsible for planning your retirement, dont expect any government to do it for you
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Ms. Wente over-generalizes, which she acknowledges, but besides that, she doesn’t mention what I think is the cardinal failure of the baby boomers: they didn’t prepare the next generation, either by example or by teaching, for living within its means.