November 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once. Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968.
—David Brooks (2008)
The biggest, but most underreported, financial story in America is the looming retirement disaster. Eighty million baby boomers are approaching retirement and most have absolutely no idea what’s going to hit them. For them the financial crisis isn’t over. It’s just about to begin.
—Brett Arends (2010)
Deep into the Great Recession summer of 2009, the career consultant Carleen MacKay noticed that boomers’ hallmark individualism and optimism were sources of frustration: these traits blocked recognition and understanding of major systemic, economic changes. Aging boomers attending her lectures or workshops retained a dogmatic faith that if they tweaked resumes and made cosmetic changes (losing weight, plastic surgery) their persistent individual efforts would yield “one more job” (secure and full time) like the one they had before—in occupational sectors that were, in fact, rapidly shrinking. “They’re still looking for twentieth-century promises to be kept,” said MacKay.1
Indeed, boomers’ “Me Generation” heritage of individualism, confidence, and can-do optimism remained surprisingly strong during the Great Recession. A 2009 Focalyst survey found that only 25 percent of boomers were downbeat, backward-looking members of a “Yesterday” segment. Thirty percent fell into a “Today” segment that was fairly upbeat and of the opinion that “we live in exciting times.” And a full 45 percent were classified in the “Tomorrow” segment, characterized by the belief that tomorrow would be better than today.2 Most mainstream media coverage of the present and future retirement crises (as well as boomers’ own postings on the Web and Internet) has emphasized individual solutions, not collective political action.
But deeper, darker currents of doubt and fear were also awakened. The real estate and stock market meltdowns and the consequent severe recession stirred Older Boomers’ memories of their parents’ stories of widespread hardship during the Great Depression. Peggy Noonan observed that “those thinking about retirement are just old enough to remember America before the abundance, before everyone was rich, rich being defined as plenty to eat, a stable place to live and some left over for fun and pleasure. For them, the crash has released old memories. And it’s spooking people.”3
“We’re seeing values and behaviors going back to the Depression,” declared Jody Holtzman, AARP’s senior vice president for thought leadership, whose research staff had just conducted a survey of consumer attitudes and behavior of Americans over forty-five. “It’s cash only, they’re saving and they’re going out less.”4
Older Boomers (born 1946–55) are becoming a culturally conscious generation, but they are not yet a politically conscious one.5 They are growing comfortable with the term and identity of “boomer” because they are linked together by common history and memories, made manifest in nostalgia for the popular culture of their youth—especially rock music and television. Animated by these new cultural forces in the 1960s, youthful college-educated boomers protested inequities in “the System” and set in motion many important cultural and institutional changes, especially in reducing discrimination against minorities, women, and gays and lesbians. Many boomers were instrumental in the “change we can believe in” presidential campaign of Barack Obama and are active in his administration.
In the aftermath of bursting residential real estate bubbles, the stock market meltdown and the Great Recession, many aging boomers are economically anxious, unquestionably more aware of their shared economic and retirement vulnerabilities. And AARP has been reminding boomers of their advancing age and retirement anxieties through its stepped-up advertising and its famous saturation mass-mailing campaigns.
The predisposing sociological factors for the emergence of generational mobilization and protest would seem to be perfectly aligned: rising economic tensions, structural strain, political polarization, a growing sense of crisis, and precipitating events, such as a deep recession, layoffs, and the looming fight over Medicare and Social Security changes. Yet the most striking finding about boomers’ senior power potential is its absence—so far. Why?
Carleen MacKay concluded that mounting job losses were not yet sufficiently threatening to galvanize collective action. “It is not at the point yet where enough people (boomers) have been impacted directly so terribly that they’re willing to take a stance—yet.”6 This has been true especially for the approximately one-third of Older Boomers who have college degrees. As discussed in chapter 4, the 2010 Metlife report on the Great Recession’s impact on Older Boomers indicates that those with college degrees have better prospects for maintaining their jobs and salaries than do than their non-college-educated generational brethren.7 The Great Recession has adversely affected far more Americans in the managerial and professional classes than did previous economic downturns; but these upscale, unemployed casualties have not responded collectively or politically.8 Again, why?
Carleen MacKay observed that boomers experiencing job or career setbacks often expressed disenchantment with government—but also feelings of personal alienation, powerlessness, and passivity. “People feel so disenfranchised they don’t know how to act. They feel defeated, and [they feel,] ‘There’s not much I can do about it anyway, so better hunker down and take care of myself.’ ”9 These sentiments hardly constitute the high-octane fuel required for a robust generational voting bloc or political protest movement.
As emphasized in chapter 3, aging boomers’ continuing ideological emphases upon individual responsibility, self-blame, and do-it-yourself solutions block communication about common problems, the necessary precursor to generating a sense of urgency, moral outrage, and a widespread feeling that “something needs to be done.” These factors, in turn, are essential in spurring political mobilization and proposals for systemic reform. Additionally, instead of rising generational economic and sociological convergence, deepening class and educational gaps sharply divide boomers against themselves politically and culturally. Boomer elites and professional classes embrace supercapitalism, globalization, multiculturalism, progressive politics, and social engineering, while more vulnerable middle- and working-class boomers fear or mistrust those forces.10 Class-based cultural divides, do-it-yourself individualism, and negative boomer stereotypes—often generated by boomers themselves—remain the most formidable obstacles to any sort of age-based voting bloc or movement mobilization to defend Social Security, Medicare, or other entitlements.
If there is not another period of prolonged prosperity and/or a steady rise in stock market values during the next decade, a majority of Older Boomers will be as dependent upon Medicare and Social Security as their parents were. As suggested in chapter 4, there are preliminary signs that even antigovernment Tea Party boomers are becoming aware of this dilemma.11
But mere talk of entitlement reductions thus far has not mobilized larger numbers of boomers because most are still employed. Despite stock market and real estate declines coupled with rising unemployment or the fear of it, most Older Boomers still assume that there is more time, “one more tomorrow.” But in five or ten years, there will be no more “tomorrows” in terms of retirement planning.
Thus there is the potential catalyst of “the crisis next time,” a slow-growth economy coupled with a future financial panic or entitlement crisis that would hit millions of Older Boomers when they are fully retired, unable to continue or resume working, and dependent upon retirement accounts, Social Security, and Medicare. Direct, immediate experience of Social Security or Medicare cutbacks by retired boomers might finally elicit a mass political response. (“When my Social Security check is actually cut in half, that’s when I’ll get mad,” Examiner.com baby boomer columnist Paul Briand informed me.)12
Generational leadership might also galvanize aging boomers’ identity, raise consciousness, and inspire collective political action. But there is no self-identified champion of aging boomers’ interests.
I asked nearly everyone interviewed for this book: Who speaks for boomers? Who might be their leader, their Claude Pepper (the late U.S. senator from Florida, long identified as the Senate’s champion for senior citizens)? Virtually everyone answered, in so many words, “No one I can think of.” Practically no one suggested AARP.
Yet AARP is the only organization capable of framing, debating, and mobilizing a defense of entitlements and other issues of concern to older Americans. In the absence of a new Claude Pepper or any collective “we” in the form of a voting bloc or broadly-based boomer political movement, AARP remains the de facto political voice for aging Americans. But AARP’s commitment to Medicare and Social Security is now questioned by millions of boomers and older Americans who suspect that AARP sold them out by supporting real or alleged rationing and redistribution embodied in the newly enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. AARP will probably survive this crisis, as it has others in the past. Lately, the organization is earning considerable goodwill by sponsoring forty-eight job fairs for older Americans in nineteen states. As its critics complain, AARP is “too big to fail.”
But whither the nation-state in an era of globalization and declining levels of interpersonal and institutional trust?
Aging boomers and AARP will continue their political mating dance in a rapidly changing society. One reason the health care reform debates became so polarizing was that they were connected to unasked, highly sensitive questions involving the impact of supercapitalism, immigration, and globalization upon national identity, interpersonal and institutional trust, and the future of the nation-state and the civic solidarity that underpins Social Security, Medicare, and the spirit of E Pluribus Unum.
Today, as Robert Reich has emphasized, global supercapitalism has sapped the cooperative spirit of the social compact, civic society, and E Pluribus Unum by making an international bounty of market choices available to individual consumers and investors.13 And as Robert Putnam’s politically inconvenient survey research findings demonstrate, increasing ethnic diversity erodes the “social networks and associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness” that hold civic society together.14 Yet these processes and consequences are only dimly seen or are simply denied by the nation’s leaders.
One of the most amazing discoveries of my years of field research and conversations with experts on the subject of aging baby boomers was that practically no one had considered the “big picture” question of how to maintain mid-twentieth-century nation-state entitlements in the midst of twenty-first-century change. Social Security and Medicare were seen as problematic; so were political polarization and declining levels of trust in government; but the rapidly changing demographic and institutional contexts were not considered at all.
When I did raise these questions, nearly all those I talked with were initially intrigued, even excited—until and unless the tabooed subject of immigration was mentioned. Then, in many situations, the atmosphere grew somewhat anxious or defensive. Sometimes the topic of immigration was dismissed as unimportant or as a diversion promoted by talk radio or former CNN pundit Lou Dobbs. Officially, AARP has been mute on the subject: immigration as a political or public policy issue is not discussed in its publications—though cultural diversity is studied and celebrated.15
The deep perceptual divisions between the nation’s elites and America’s middle and working classes on the consequences of global supercapitalism and immigration augur similar conflicts on entitlement reform. As seen in previous chapters, immigration has been the unacknowledged “elephant in the room” in public debates about health care, Social Security, and Medicare reform.16
California’s immigration-driven, age/ethnic/class divisions are spreading into much of metropolitan America.17 This increasingly alarms corporate, government, and public policy leaders attuned to the health of the nation’s civic and volunteer organizations. Several organizations and foundations (including the U.S. government’s Corporation for National and Community Service, AARP, and the well-known nonprofit group Civic Ventures) have launched major initiatives to foster volunteerism and civic engagement—with a special eye toward recruiting millions of retired baby boomers.18
Advocates of civic engagement campaigns and entitlement reform have assumed that boomers will want to “give back” to society and leave a positive legacy because they have cherished children and grandchildren. (“Preserving Social Security for future generations” is now an AARP mantra.) And many polls indicate boomers’ desire to engage in volunteer or civic efforts.
Yet the Yankelovich researchers J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman warned that boomers have little interest in a long-term “legacy” except in terms of how well they defend their own interests in the here and now. “Boomers want a mission, but not to leave a legacy. They want to make a difference for themselves today.”19 As for volunteerism, self-interested boomers have a preference for quick, specialized relationships (enhanced by modern technologies) that may produce transitory “connections without community,” not the broad, diffuse bonds required for social capital.20 (In January 2009, AARP confirmed such insights by launching its “Create the Good” Web site so that members with limited time could quickly access online forums and search databases for civic involvement opportunities.)
The stock market dive and Great Recession have led to sobering reassessments as to how many boomers might be able or willing to participate in civic renewal. One Beltway proponent of these initiatives told me:
This [boomer] generation has had a unique combination of leisure, wealth, and some kind of civic orientation. Perfect ingredients! But what is the impact of this current financial crisis? One-third of that retirement wealth that created the space for people to do all this stuff has disappeared. And work-life needs to be extended [and] may crowd out all that. There’s this weird feeling that we were dealing with something of a bubble of civic possibility and it was rising and suddenly it just lost all the air—before it really happened. It was just coming together. This is a huge challenge to us.21
By 2010, an AARP survey entitled “Connecting and Giving” emphasized that midlife and older Americans were less optimistic about the potential of civic activities and were more individually and sporadically involved than in the past. “The fragmentation of American life,” wrote the report’s authors, “is a challenge for membership organizations . . . that rely on formal, volunteer support.”22 The impact of the economic meltdown on the nation’s educated upper middle classes confirmed critics’ suspicions that the well-publicized civic engagement crusade was tacitly geared to relatively well-off, educated Americans (or those with generous pensions) who had the leisure time and resources to volunteer.
Even if economic conditions improve, mobilizing aging boomers for civic renewal may be as difficult as generating political consciousness and action. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, it is important to remember that approximately one-third of boomers have only one child or are childless; others may be alienated from their children because of divorce, geographical distance, or other factors. (Even within their own families, aging boomers are being forced to choose between investing for retirement or putting aside funds for their children’s college education. The Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Opdyke and his spouse pondered this choice and decided: “I think that instead of a free ride through college, a better gift to my kids is a mom and dad financially self-sufficient in their dotage.”)23
In a world of global supercapitalism, mass migrations, and eroding trust and national identity, the coming debates over old-age entitlements raise fundamental questions about the nature of the social order, social cohesion, and the durability of the social contract between generations, between employers and employees, and between state and citizens: What is a nation? What do we owe one another? Who are we? What holds us together? Is there a shared vision of the future?
Change, dissolution, and decline are old themes in the social sciences. In the nineteenth century the massive social upheavals caused by the Twin Revolutions (Industrial and French) led to the founding of sociology, the field that focuses on sources and impact of social order, social cohesion, and social change. France’s Alexis de Tocqueville, August Comte, and Emile Durkheim, and Germany’s Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Max Weber, focused on the impact of industrialization and spreading democracy on the key institutions of community, tradition, authority, religion, social class, moral order, and shared values.24 At the end of the nineteenth century, Oswald Spengler mourned “the decline of the West.”
Likewise, political elites’ worries about class polarization and declining social cohesion date at least as far back as ancient Rome. In terms of U.S. history, the most direct parallel to the current century is the dawn of the previous one. Theodore Roosevelt and the founders of the Progressive movement were deeply concerned about alleviating problems posed by industrialization, mass immigration, and class polarization. The Progressive era gave birth to today’s faith that changing and managing the social environment could change human behavior. The many reforms of the Progressive era from 1900 to 1920 were designed to blunt class conflict, institutionalize labor-management negotiations, “Americanize” immigrants, and quench the appeal of anarchist and socialist solutions. The redistributive reforms of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s served similar ends. Social Security was founded during a time of intensely felt national crisis, and thirty years later Medicare was born in the consensus, hope, and optimism of the 1960s Great Society.
Today, the industrial nation-state that gave birth to the boomers and to old-age entitlements is morphing into something else. We are not yet sure what this “New America” (as Peggy Noonan terms it) will look like. We do receive daily reminders of the passing of the “Old America.” Two of the most poignant were the deaths of former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite and Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cronkite had symbolized something of a one-man national consensus, a unifying, reassuring, trusted source who seemed to transcend societal differences. Asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow if there could ever again be such a figure in American news media, the current NBC Evening News anchor Brian Williams quickly responded, “No. We’re too fragmented now.”25 And Senator Ted Kennedy was the embodiment of the Old America’s can-do spirit and optimistic trust in big-government programs. No more.
Within weeks of Senator Kennedy’s death, as the political sound and fury escalated about proposed congressional health care reforms, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, pondered whether the original 1965 Medicare legislation might today be met with the same doubt, skepticism, and polarization. He concluded it would. The reason: “Broad distrust of government—which was not evident in the 1960s—is an important reason why Americans are reacting so differently to health care reform in 2009 than they did in 1965.” In the late 1950s, Kohut discovered, 65 percent of Americans trusted the national government to do the right thing always or most of the time. By 1974, only 36 percent did. And the trust in government has never been recovered.26
The policy scholar Elaine Kamarck warned excited fellow Democrats about the “Trust Challenge” in a 2008 paper entitled “Change You Can Believe In Needs a Government You Can Trust.”27 Like Kohut, Kamarck marshaled polling data to demonstrate fifty years of declining public trust that that government would do the right thing “just about always or most of the time.” She argued that declining trust in government had produced the “postbureaucratic state,” in which new policies moved away from direct taxation or regulation and increasingly toward substituting market-based incentives (such as those used in the federal regulation of sulfur dioxide and in the proposed “cap and trade” system for carbon dioxide controls). And policy implementation was increasingly carried out by public/private hybrid organizations (via subcontracting and outsourcing) rather than by government agencies. After the autumn of 2008, however, Kamarck found that professional and public trust in market-driven systems had collapsed along with the stock market.28
“Will We Ever Trust Wall Street Again?” asked veteran Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig, who observed that the financial crisis severely threatened average investors’ beliefs in a “just world” of free markets, individual responsibility, and investing for the future.29 Former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker sensed rising popular mistrust of business and government collusion. “It’s good to be skeptical about government. We ought to be skeptical. But at the bottom, you know, we need some trust that these officials are there, they’re responsible, they’re doing the best they can in the interest of the country. A lot of that’s been lost, [there’s] this feeling that the lobbyists are controlling everything and the amount of money involved is enormous, which it is.”30 The Republican pollster Frank Luntz added his concern: “For business and political elites, the message is clear: Restore trust.”31
By 2010 a Pew Research Center report revealed “a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government: a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.” Age was not a major variable, but political affiliation was: nearly 80 percent of all age groups—with the exception of 67 percent of adults under thirty—thought government could be trusted to do what was right only some of the time or never. Eighty-six percent of Republicans agreed, as did 79 percent of Independents, but only 64 percent of Democrats. Ninety-two percent of those who approved of the Tea Party movement also agreed. (Nearly two-thirds of respondents held negative views of banks, other financial institutions, and large corporations, while majorities darkly regarded the national news media and the entertainment industry; 49 percent had negative views of labor unions, while only 32 percent held positive views.)32
Many liberals had hoped that the 2008 election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress would bring the return of something like the New Deal. (A postelection Time magazine cover portrayed Obama as Franklin Roosevelt complete with top hat and cigarette holder.) Indeed, despite the rising tide of public mistrust of government, the most progressive legislative landmarks in decades have been enacted: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Yet these reforms seem to lack widespread public understanding and support. The 2010 Republican congressional victories threaten to stall or compromise this new legislation through funding cutbacks or changes or delays in implementation.
As pointed out in previous chapters, boomers have been fragmented in their responses to both the economic crises and increasing threats to Social Security and Medicare. Baby boomers have been among the leaders in both Obama’s presidential campaign and the Tea Party movement. But will any political party or organization—specifically AARP—be able to win the allegiance of a “critical mass” of rank-and-file boomers, especially the Older Boomers who are just now beginning to assume a sense of “ownership” of Social Security and Medicare? Who will win the boomers’ trust? Or will masses of boomer individuals ultimately trust only in themselves?
I shall end this book with the question posed at the beginning: Will aging boomers become an awakening, age-conscious political giant, increasingly visible either as an inert voting bloc or as a more active political movement geared to the protection of Medicare and Social Security? Can aging boomers transcend their many internal cultural, economic, and political differences and vote their age-based interests, fulfilling the presumption of age-motivated voting in the “senior power model” challenged by Robert Binstock? And what will be the role of AARP?
Boomers’ senior power potential will be heavily influenced by the nation’s economic future. Another decade of stagnant stock and real estate markets coupled with a long “jobless recovery” will increase aging boomers’ collective sense of angst and vulnerability—but also entangle Social Security and Medicare funding battles with rising economic and social problems of other population segments, especially in the wake of the Great Recession. In a widely read Atlantic magazine cover story, senior editor Don Peck listed these problems: “A slowly sinking [younger] generation; a remorseless assault on the identity of many men; the dissolution of families and the collapse of neighborhoods; a thinning veneer of national amity—the social legacies of the Great Recession are still being written, but their breadth and depth are immense. As problems, they are enormously complex and their solutions will be equally so.”33 How will these forces shape boomers’ political choices of “Me, We, or AARP”?
Should boomers remain fragmented by class, educational, cultural, and other differences, then the “politics of me” will prevail, an individualized, issue-oriented politics of “tailored engagement” predicted in the 2004 AARP study A Changing Political Landscape. Instead of a rerun of 1960s mass protests, aging boomer politics will be narrowly issue oriented, reflecting a more limited political involvement style, operating outside the traditional two-party system via Web-based communities and “checkbook activism.”34 Boomers’ “strong sense of entitlement and self-directed motivations will help to create a more decentralized, broader, community-based path for activism.”35
A “politics of we,” a boomer-based voting bloc or political movement, could still emerge in response to aggressive White House and congressional efforts to reduce Social Security benefits or to ration Medicare directly or indirectly. The five-hundred-billion-dollar cut in projected increases in Medicare spending contained in the 2010 PPACA has already energized groups of boomers and seniors and led to Republican pledges to “repeal” PPACA after the 2010 elections. The Great Recession has raised Older Boomers’ preretirement anxieties and vulnerabilities: a majority are now more clearly aware that they are financially unprepared for retirement. This is likely one reason why age joined the key variables of class and race in structuring voting behavior in the 2008 presidential election, especially in the Democratic primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
A third, middle-ground, cooperative scenario may well emerge through AARP’s de facto leadership in defining and brokering aging boomers’ health care and retirement interests with the rest of American society. In spite of its controversial, partisan support of the Democrats’ successful comprehensive health care reform, the “nonpartisan” organization endures as one of the nation’s most trusted institutions. Through its outreach to younger generations and its keen awareness of the changing demographic makeup of the nation, AARP has positioned itself as the arbiter of generational equity and the champion of the social contract that underpins Medicare and Social Security.
AARP’s increasing emphasis on intergenerational cooperation and equity is being echoed by popular pundits on both the left and the right. The liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman advocates “regeneration,” emphasizing that “we have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.”36 His conservative Times colleague David Brooks has called for a “Geezer Crusade,” recognizing that “only the old can lead a generativity revolution—millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.”37
But happy talk of intergenerational generosity may be a tough sell. Brooks’s proposal for a Geezer Crusade was greeted with scorn by many online responders, including one “reader-recommended” commenter, a likely boomer cynic, who jeered, “Dream on, Dude.”
Calls for generational confrontation have also appeared in the Times: “Are We Overpaying Grandpa?” the University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan pointedly asked. She noted that the elderly receive a disproportionate amount of government spending, an average $40,000 each. Combined with their private incomes and home-based wealth, their living standard far exceeds that of the average American. Mulligan posed a blunt challenge. “The question for the future of Medicare is this: Are families ready to triple their spending on the health care of their highest-income family members?”38
The entitlement time bomb is ticking. Changes are inevitable. In 2010, for the first time, working Americans’ annual Social Security Statement carried the following warning on its front page:
About Social Security’s Future
Social Security is a compact between generations. Since 1935, America has kept the promise of security for its workers and their families. Now, however, the Social Security system is facing serious financial problems, and action is needed soon to make sure the system will be sound when today’s younger workers are readying for retirement.
In 2016 we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted and there will be enough money to pay only about 76 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits. We need to resolve these issues soon to make sure Social Security continues to provide a foundation of protection for future generations.
In 1990, Medicare and Social Security represented 28 percent of federal spending; by 2019, that figure may approach 40 percent. The nation’s economic future is uncertain—as are the sociological cohesion and intergenerational solidarity of the Western world’s aging nation-states. Indeed, in Greece and in France, recent entitlement changes provoked strikes and civil unrest. Most probably that will not happen here. Reforms of Social Security and Medicare will more likely entail prolonged political combat among pundits, policy makers, and think tanks, throughout Washington’s vast lobbying labyrinth, and, ultimately, upon the battlefields in Congress—heavily influenced by the White House. All of them will be attuned to public opinion.
Americans appear about evenly divided on raising the eligibility ages for both Medicare and Social Security.39 As for implementing private accounts for Social Security, a 2010 Pew Research Center study found that among respondents aged eighteen to twenty-nine, 70 percent were in favor of the idea versus 14 percent opposed; among those aged thirty to forty-nine, 63 percent were in favor, 23 percent opposed; among those aged fifty to sixty-four (baby boomers), 54 percent were in favor, 36 percent opposed; while among those aged sixty-five and over, 42 percent were in favor and 42 percent opposed.40
But the Pew Center study found that most age groups opposed replacing Medicare with an individualized voucher system: among those aged sixty-five and over, 69 percent were opposed versus 14 percent in favor; among those aged fifty to sixty-four, 57 percent were opposed versus 25 percent in favor; among those aged eighteen to twenty-nine, 53 percent were opposed versus 38 percent in favor; only those among those aged thirty to forty-nine were a majority in favor (48 percent, versus 37 percent opposed).
By the end of 2010, trial balloons for entitlement reforms were being lofted as a rising number of major pundits and policy makers proposed that the greater good of national debt reduction might justify Social Security and Medicare modifications. Major newspaper editorial pages and columnists began chipping away at Social Security’s sacred status.41
In a popular Time magazine cover story, “Restoring the American Dream,” the influential journalist Fareed Zakaria advanced a seductive growth-versus-entitlements argument that will be echoed in months to come. Zakaria prescribed vastly increased private investment and innovation and reduced consumption—the latter achieved, in part, through “radical rebalancing of government.” This, in turn, would entail sharp reductions in health care and public pension spending—cuts that would hugely and disproportionately affect aging boomers.42 Major think tank scholars have broached similar proposals for reducing the national debt through entitlement reforms.43
As noted in chapters 5 and 6, AARP has signaled that it is open to some degree of long-term change on Social Security and Medicare.44 And, as mentioned at the close of the previous chapter, in late 2010 the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposed entitlement reductions that were favorably received.
Without AARP’s leadership and vast resources, aging boomers’ abilities to politically resist entitlement reductions against progrowth appeals to “restore the middle class” and “reduce debt for our children” would be difficult at best. As argued in chapters 3 and 4, their willingness to mobilize on their own as a voting bloc or movement may be fatally compromised by long-standing class/political/cultural divides, negative self-publicity wrought by boomers bashing boomers, and increasing calls for generational sacrifice and atonement.45
On the other hand, the results of the 2010 elections probably raised levels of political polarization and stalemate in the nation (and, especially, in Washington, D.C.) to such a degree that no individual or party will dare offer—much less, successfully enact—major entitlement reforms until after the 2012 presidential elections.
But the stage is being set for entitlement reform. The fight over Social Security, Medicare, and the future of the American nation-state has begun. Divided or united, boomers will be in the thick of those battles. And, whether as advocate or mediator, so will AARP.