Quote:
Originally Posted by danielf
I find it difficult to escape the notion that a generation is being blamed for doing what current generations wouldn't do any different. Baby boomers have lived through a time a relatively great prosperity. It doesn't surprise me one bit that house prices increase in times of prosperity.
It doesn't strike me that baby boomers have in any way been knowingly irresponsible. Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to how they might have been?
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I think that the current generation is miffed because for the time being they do not have the opportunity to be in a position to gain as did the boomer generation. Windows of opportunity arise fairly rarely in any lifetime and for many boomers it was the private house boom in sales and privatisation.
For many the privatisation bonanza saw their exit in the '87 crash. For me that huge bonanza yielded a small amount over Libor rates so the whole experience was a useless exercise. Nobody without real money and a constitution of iron held long enough to make real money and even some who did saw their nest eggs broken to 10p in the pound in 2000. Myths abound but reality is different.
Houses are a completely different ball game and few would argue that they are stupidly high. I can think of one owned by a relative that was bought new 43 years ago for £10K and now would carry a price tag of 80X that amount. The owner and all other boomers have done nothing to influence that but the answer for bidding up prices to stupid levels lies with the surprising wealth friendliness of the Labour administration from 1997.
Oh yes they did favour wealth and from what I heard the number of bright young things hitting £250K salaries increased with incredible speed. They pumped prices up not the boomers because in a market passive onlookers have no influence on prices. Only bidders move prices up and then only if not overwhelmed by supply.
As to what happened to all the benefits from the bounties that were found or were one offs. Various governments mishandled them and with usual gross incompetence vast numbers of billions vanished into the ether. If there was ever a boom for real money to be made it was from 1997 to 2007 and relatively few of the boomers were going to go out on a limb in their fifties so proportionately did not really gain.
I actually think that the problems being blamed on the boomers should be better directed at those who did rather nicely in the golden decade, courtesy of Labour.
---------- Post added at 18:29 ---------- Previous post was at 18:06 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
Hrm nope. By the 80s it was very clear that birth rates weren't going to be enough to replenish the work force when Boomers retired, the can was kicked down the street.
Climate change I'll go along with, the pensions and health care costs I won't.
As you've said though there's no reason to think it would or could be any other way, doesn't mean I have to like it, and I sincerely hope that my own generation bequeath the one below us with a better legacy though I'm not entirely sure how we can given we'll both be paying pensions and health care for boomers along with more and more of our own costs.
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Governments would never relinquish the grip on the source of revenue which was always going to head into crisis. Dozens of times the questions were raised but no answers were ever forthcoming. Even the carefully negotiated de-linking from NI by some companies retained a symbiotic link as control would not be given up. My work pension is intrinsically linked with the state pension in a complex web.
A lot of people wanted to opt out of the government schemes or anything linked with them but with NI just going into a communal pot along with tax the hand to mouth system carried on. It was known decades ago that the ratio of payers\receivers had been 7:1 and would likely become an unsustainable 2:1 but it was left for whoever found the problem on their watch to deal with.
We never had any more control over our destiny in the past than your age group do now. We were hostage to fortune as are you.