I had a revelation the other day at the hands of my son-in-law. He explained that the baby boom generation had an average life savings including their equity in their homes of forty thousand dollars. That fact coupled with the problem of an unfunded liability of forty four trillion dollars related to the costs of their Social Security retirement fund is slightly scary. Couple that with an economy under siege from all sides and it gets downright terrifying. The Federal Budget deficits ahead look really bad, but the household budget deficits ahead during the baby boom retirement years look devastating. What are they all going to do? I guess they took seriously the mantra of the seventies. You know, "live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse". The problem is their bodies are not collapsing fast enough. Too many good vitamins or drugs or something seems to be holding them together. Now that mortality is creeping up on them they have discovered life extension; and the worst thing is it just might work. What if the insolvent generation is really going to beat the actuarial tables at the life derby casino? It will really create a fiscal mess for the next three generations to clean up unless they really band together and vote them out of existence before they die.

Nothing rankles an old buck more than when the next generation grows up and disses him. Just because he is still wearing knee pants and running around with his grand children's girlfriends with his wallet flapping in the breeze. In the case of the baby boomers the wallet is on empty most of the time and the inheritance will be slightly in the negative. My kids are not going to honor my credit card bills any time soon, why should they have to carry my retirement costs? Evidently because they don't vote their wallets like we did. They either vote their religion or they don't vote at all. In any case the facts of life include something I like to call TANSTAAFL in honor of the guy that taught me that fact. Robert Heinlein wrote Science fiction and his book "Stranger In A Strange Land" is familiar to a lot of baby boomers. In most of his other books he stressed the fact that independence of mind was the key to life. TANSTAAFL stands for, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"; something the baby boom children seem to not realize yet.

Now most of us spend a little time in life trying to find a free lunch and then break down and look for a job because the wear and tear of trying to cadge free lunches is too great. A few of us never get the fact that the freest lunch on earth has a price that may be too great to pay. They tend to live lives of "constant sorrow", to steal a line from a song. But here we are with a whole generation heading for retirement without the proverbial pot or the proverbial window. It is going to get scary in those nursing homes folks, and they are already not on my top ten list of things to do!

Homelessness is an option that few of us are ready to consider but many of us might face it if we don't wake up and save something. Our government is broke folks and getting broker every day. It ain't going to be there with the gold plated bed pans when we all need them. They are being used up by our parent's generation or beaten into swords to hold our enemies at bay. We are just going to be out of luck unless we can figure out how to stretch a rubbery dollar a lot further. Greenspan thinks price deflation is the enemy but it is one of the few things that could counteract the lack of savings. If we could deflate the dollar back to what it was worth before we were born the forty thousand could easily cover the problem. It could be enough, especially if our life spans could be adjusted to the same scale as our grandparent's. Oh well I guess Herbert was right, its time to call on the adults, but our kids may be too busy trying to find work in this jobless economy to take care of the problem. God bless and keep you all safe in these retiring times.