There is something extremely wrong with this picture, and that something is depressed wages. Old Boomers and Xers to a lesser extent took the full hit from Reaganomics and stupid economists who said wages were inflationary and not a lagging indicator that inflation had already occurred. Plus, we lost pension contributions when we changed jobs or a company was sold or failed. Pensions only became portable in the 90s, too late for most of us.
I was a saver, not a spender. What killed me was inability to get health insurance. I'd save, the bottom would fall out, and I'd have to start again when I recovered enough to go back to work, usually against medical advice.
Gen Z won't be able to relate to this because as we retire or die off, there will no longer be 10 applicants for every job, there will be multiple job openings for every applicant and they will be seeing their wages rise. This is a good thing, rising wages are the rising tide that lifts all boats and Reagan, like the rest of the Republicans and most authors of economics texts, was dead wrong about where the money needed to go.
So we old Boomers are sorry about this mess, kids, but we weren't the ones who cut our own financial throats. That was a stupid, lazy old bastard named Ronald Reagan. You're read about him, I'm sure, in glowing terms in books written by people who felt all warm and fuzzy while he napped and his buddies robbed us blind.
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