By meistergedanken
There was an article in the Raleigh News & Observer recently (authored by Mandy Locke) about women from the Boomer generation, who were (coincidentally?) “single, retired and broke”. It contained a revealing combination of facts that delineate an imminent dilemma for American Society while offering specious explanations for that dilemma.
A few key statistics:
• “About 40% of female baby boomers are currently single (up from 30% in 1989).”
• “Nationally there are about 17 million single females ages 46 to 64; about two-thirds of them separated from, divorced or buried their spouse.”
• “The Federal Reserve Board found in 2001 that only a third of single women had any sort of retirement savings account; at the same time, fewer than 10% of single women had a pension through their jobs. This compared with about two-thirds of married couples and 42% of single men with retirement accounts.”
First, it must be said that often women don’t take or deliberately seek jobs that provide retirement accounts, unless it is some government post with a “guaranteed” pension (the quotes here denote the fact that in this day and age, there are no more guarantees). Thoughts of retirement not being a priority, they would rather secure “fun”, glamorous or sociable employment that has a lot of inter-personal interaction, where profits are irrelevant or where their schedules are accommodated. The wife of a friend of mine works as the only employee at a high-end jewelry shop, where she has no retirement benefits and poor medical benefits with large deductibles. There is really no future for a career in such an establishment. But she doesn’t care: she likes her boss (the owner), is beloved by the clientele, and best of all, gets to regularly travel to New York on buying trips for the shop. She pays for her car, the internet and phone and spends the rest of her money on gifts for her friends and family, and toys for herself. My friend, as the husband, can worry about paying off the house and saving for their old age.
Indeed, it has long been the province of men to shoulder the burden of saving and planning for retirement. Women are typically happy to defer to their husbands in these matters, because financial stuff is BORING. Not fun at all. It does not occur to them that men don’t find it exactly stimulating, either. Yet somehow it seems to get lumped in with other manly pursuits, such as watching football, as things men inexplicably like to do that women won’t willingly endure. When you take this into consideration, it is not surprising that not only do single men have more retirement resources than single women, but married men are even more likely to have those resources, as they are no doubt well aware that with a woman along for the ride, their expenses went up dramatically.
The article employs – and this will astonish no one – the usual suspect arguments to deflect financial responsibility from retiring women. The old chestnut that women earned only “77 cents to the man’s dollar” was regurgitated, for example, so naturally there couldn’t save as much as they needed to. Another is that women returning to the workforce after divorce or child rearing are confronted with workplaces that don’t “have space or patience for them, ” from which the reader can infer is due to a soft form of gender discrimination. Another excuse is that Boomer women weren’t properly informed about retirement planning, implying failure on the part of the education system, perhaps. To that I can only say that it is ironic that the very women who scorned Home Economics and banished it from school systems everywhere, when it was the most reliable way to convey to young women the value of a dollar and how to budget for expenses, are the same women who could have benefited from its lessons in frugality and thrift! Next we will hear the wailing of “why didn’t you stop us from squandering our money!”
““I never thought about retirement. No one ever talked about it and what I needed to do,” said Katrina Philips, 62, of Clayton, N.C. “I guess I was stupid about it.””
Yeah, no kidding – along with all the other chicks who imagined themselves clones of the fictional populace of “Sex in the City”, who only swilled drinks and swapped tales about their tawdry escapades!
What is left unsaid is the fact that women in general have poorer impulse control, which ultimately means most of them can’t handle money. Obviously, advertisers know this, and craft their pitches accordingly. They succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, skewing the economy and perverting the culture in the process until spending on frivolous consumer items is absolutely necessary just to keep everything from crashing down around us. By its very nature budgeting involves stifling the desires of the present (and curtailing spending) to obtain a measure of security in the future. What the “experts” who cheered the entrance of women into the workplace fail to understand is that it doesn’t matter how much money you earn; if you can’t handle money, then you never have enough of it. Many men, but to an even greater degree women, have been mortgaging the future to enable buying sprees in the here-and-now.
I can assure you all that this is a temporary state of affairs. As a civilization, we are rapidly approaching the point where that which cannot work, will no longer work. Consumption that is not sustainable will cease. The debt that is too excessive shall be defaulted upon. And the society that adopts leftist-feminist principles will collapse. The refusal to acknowledge this certainty is one of the governing delusions of our times.
And of course – OF COURSE – these women will turn to daddy government, looking to the State to fill the void once filled by their husbands. But guess what? The pockets of the State will be empty, the proverbial cupboard bare. Behold the ongoing fiasco that is the Congress of the United States of America (or the parliaments of most European nations, for that matter)! Does anyone believe that the current fiscal situation can persist for another 10-20 years? Or that our national debt problems will be peaceably resolved in an orderly fashion? Or that we can continue to coast on the fumes of borrowed funds like we have for the last 30 years?
What is going to happen to all these old women living in abject poverty? Some will have to go begging to their children, if they have any, whether they are equipped to take in their mothers or not. Doubtless many a guilt trip will be embarked upon. Maybe they will try and sponge off of their male siblings, if any are still alive (as women tend to outlive men). Others will populate hastily assembled communes and institutions cobbled together from the dwindling resources of cities, others will find religion, return to God and seek shelter in charitable facilities sponsored by various resurgent religious orders, and some will simply become homeless. Ultimately, it’s not our problem. And furthermore, the government will be too broke and powerless to MAKE it our problem….
Try not to be overcome with Schadenfreude.
Demographic changes are typically powerful but slow; they tend to sneak up upon us much like rising flood waters: in the morning you look outside and the river looks high. Later on in the afternoon you see the river again and you think to yourself, “Hmm, the river is rising – it seems to be higher than it was this morning.” That night you drift heedlessly off to sleep as the murky water creeps up to your doorstep. And in the morning you wake up to find your first floor has four feet of water in it. Now you are fucked.
Women of the Boomer Generation: you have truly fucked yourselves.
Meistergedanken is a neither young nor old engineer/artist residing in Ohio, earnestly and diligently attempting to unravel Life’s mysteries (the ones that don’t require higher math, anyway).
http://meistergedanken.livejournal.com
