If Millennials realize they’re going to have to pay the fiscal price for baby boomers’ sins, they might choose to leave the US for more financially friendly locations.
Tim Kane, Guest Blogger, Christian Science Monitor
What if they had a fiscal crisis, and nobody came? What if the chump generation figures out the Ponzi scheme? Bob Samuelson thinks the fallout will be political:
… As baby boomers retire, higher federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may boost Millennials’ taxes and squeeze other government programs. It will be harder to start and raise families.
Millennials [ages 30 and younger] could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders’ economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers’ retirement.
Samuelson asks the question in a political context, and that’s how most analysts interpret the looming fiscal crisis, as if young voters will punish fiscally irresponsible representatives in Washington. My alternative theory focuses on the context of immigration. Already you may have heard about the millions of illegals who departed the U.S. when the Great Recession dried up job opportunities. A lot of crass nativists might think “Good Riddance!” but I wonder what they’ll say when their own children seek greener pastures abroad in 10 or 20 years?
Consider: almost everyone younger than the Baby Boomers expects to get the short end of the fiscal stick. We were laughing about the unlikeliehood of getting Social Securiyt Checks when I was in high school in the 80s. So now that the reckoning is all but unkickable, do the Boomers think their kids and grandkids will just become fiscal serfs? Think again.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/Growthology/2010/0310/Will-Millennials-leave-US-to-avoid-becoming-the-chump-generation
