Dear Young People: Baby Boomers are NOT threatening your future SS benefits
The GOP is.
It wants to destroy Social Security and the entire “safety net.” To go after Social Security, they have been pitting the generations against each other, working hard to convince young people that the taxes they pay into the system will never come back to them. AND then the GOP, having gained power, takes actions to make sure that young people won’t have the benefits today’s recipients have – and neither will anyone else.
It is true the baby boomer bubble once threatened the solvency of the Social Security system. So Democrats fixed the problem. We raised taxes and set aside enough EXTRA funds in a “lock box” to get us over the hump of baby boomer recipients. Then George W. Bush came into office and went to war against Iraq. Rather than paying for the war with a war tax – as all previous wars had been paid for – the GOP voted to STEAL from the dedicated Social Security funds. That is the only reason that the system is threatened with insolvency now.
So, yes, there is a deficit again in the system – because the GOP stole funds from Social Security to pay for the Iraq war. But the deficit, once again, is fixable -- if we had a Congress that was dedicated to preserving Social Security for future generations. The solution would be to raise the cap on Social Security income (so people at every income level face the same tax instead of lower income people paying a higher percentage) and/or to extend the tax to unearned income, like dividends. That’s what the Democrats advocate -- and such a plan would provide the funds to ensure that young people would have the same benefits that the Boomers do.
On the other hand, the GOP’s plan is to destroy Social Security for future recipients, by limiting it only to lower income seniors – i.e., to turn it into a form of welfare. And we know how little support there is for welfare. That would be just the beginning of the end for Social Security.
Please don’t be deceived. The GOP is not on your side. Not on Social Security, not on the environment that you will be inheriting, and not on anything else.
= new reply since forum marked as read
An older person complained that her SSI payment only increased $4/month while some other monthly cost rose $6.
A legitimate concern, I grant. However, she explicitly blames Obama for it, and she hopes "that our new President will work fast to correct this."
I verbally laughed in her face and pointed out that the GOP has been stealing from her, and that Trump & the GOP Congress sure as shit won't care about her $4/month. I suggested that she consider this the next time she goes to the polls.
And then I got a "warning" for posting political content. 
Yes there was a baby boom after 1945; but they forget since 1990 the the number of births each year has been even higher than during the baby boom - around 4 million a year, compared to 3.9 million a year in the 1946-64 period.
They also forget the effects of immigration, which over the last 50 years has added 50 million people.
Consequently, the number of Americans at or near retirement age is, today, not at all disproportionately larger than the number of people of any given age in the younger cohorts (i.e. the number of people age 65, is no larger - and actually smaller - than the number of people age, say, 48, or 32). The U.S. population pyramid illustrates this dynamic at work:
But of course, Republicans know that it takes too long to explain this to most people (and with Faux viewers, it's mission impossible).
