to ask if you're pissed off with the Baby Boomers?

[DamFineBeaver]

Because people who are currently young-ish adults (MN's main demographic?), and younger, will be paying for the lavish lifestyle they've enjoyed?
The money borrowed for their nice big pensions will be paid back by us and our children.

Does this mean they shouldn't spend so much time in Tenerife?

The only thing your average baby boomer needs to do is be balanced and empathetic and realise that future generations will have new challenges.

Specific baby boomers... Well Tony Blair does spring to mind he could have not tried to devalue degrees by making them universal thereby plunging the next generation into debt just to get a previously unqualified job. Gordon brown, maybe, he could have cut back on public spending when times were good, and not borrowed more to increase the deficit.

What should the Boomer have done.....They could have spent their money more wisely. Maybe on stuff made in the UK. That way manufacturing (or more of it) might have survived.

They certainly shouldn't have allowed their government to sell the utilities to Americans/French /germans and let all the profits go elsewhere.

bedraggledmumoftwo, I hope my earlier post (this afternoon) made it clear that I am empathetic. I've got a son of 24 and worry constantly about the challenges he faces.

And how exactly could your average man or woman have done that? What are you doing to ensure that property isn't being gobbled up by the world's wealthiest people?

bedraggled the Blairs are a case in point. Would Cherie ever have met Tony Blair as a young lawyer, had she to compete with the multitude of law graduates that are produced now? Would she have stood out so much? Would she even have gone to university, when faced with so much debt, or chosen something else?

It used to be possible for a bright young person from a relatively poor background to be very upwardly mobile just by going to university. It doesn't make so much difference now; it all depends much more on internships and impressing people, rather than exam results. And I'm guessing that's easier to do for those from an already privileged background.

Tony Blair of course went to £10,000 a year Fettes Boarding School, so he would have turned out much the same...

Actually woolly, I think that MANY women did work but SOME didn't. I think that many who post on here have middle class parents, and perhaps their mothers didn't work. Working class women have always..... well.....worked.

Muddled, yes, but I have to agree with woolly -it is a paradox that a lot of women's "lib" has actually resulted I the opposite, as women have less freedom in some ways- we may have wanted to be able to choose to work, but the reality of the financial changes that resulted is that most women now have to work, and still do everything else too.

I will take issue with those that say women never worked in the past. Most working class women did work. My grt grandmothers and grandmothers all combined work with childcare. some worked in factories others on knitting frames in their own home. My mother had a total of 7 years as a stay at home parent of five children. Even during that time she worked the twilight shift (6 til 10) in a local factory.

Bedraggled - but the two things aren't directly connected. It may appear that the increase in borrowing powers resulted from female emancipation, but I really don't think it was. I think banks/building societies lent more because the powers that be believed that if we all borrowed more and spent more, our economy would improve. Either they truly believed that or it was all a cynical ploy.

I am concerned that if women start to believe this mess was all somehow our fault for wanting to be equal, then we are truly screwed.

In fact, I believe that men are also worse off nowadays. They are certainly working longer hours.

woollyjumpers you are right about people leaving school at 15 I was born in 1955 and I left school at 15.

And women my age are the ones who are now being asked to work longer for their pensions, first it was 60, then changed to 65 and now its 66 will have worked for 51 years before I get mine.

Even during that time she worked the twilight shift (6 til 10) in a local factory.

So did my mum.

I think the world would of been a much better place if cherry had not met Tony and wasn't the brains behind getting him into power and killing millions of innocent people.

The bitch used to charge the tax payer 600 quid for her haircut and it still looked shit.

Those black and white clips they show of the man of the house arriving back from work always make me laugh. The wife is there, made up to the nines with a meal ready. Hubby with his slippers and the evening paper and squeaky clean kids. Nothing like real life for the majority.

Who's Cherry?

She's thinking of the cherry brandy she has as a night cap.

I worked all my life but I was lucky. I was a council house child with a disabled father and a working mother. She had two jobs, a market stall two days a week and the clothing factory canteen 4 days a week. We lived in a North East pit village where mum also grew up.
Grammar School was my salvation. I was an only child, always encouraged to read and taught that education was the way 'out'. I went to college with a full grant and became a teacher. I did my degree part time while bringing up my children, working full time and supporting an ailing husband (dh and df both had MS ironically).
Now I am 70, comfortable and content. I look at my dc and sdc and think:"Job done." Am I booming, not really. I've never been to Tenerife or The Seychelles though I enjoy Italy every 2 years. What exactly do those who are 'pissed off' want me to do?

This is plain jealousy. There are poor and wealthy people from their generation just as there will be from ours. Looking at other enviously will rot you to the core.

Work hard, enjoy spending time with family and friends. Life isn't magically going to get better than that no matter how much you have.

The Tories believe that the BBs' votes are for sale. The best thing the BBs can do for the following generations right now is to prove the Tories wrong. You can't change the past but you can change the future.

It proves really that voting does change things. The over 65s tend to vote in large numbers, that's why politicians don't like to upset them.

I think those who worked for only 30 years before retiring on substantial pensions would only have been particular sectors of society.

I think that in the heyday of final salary pensions it was assumed that you would work for the same company for 40-50 years and that very few people would live longer than 80.

Generally I think that you would have to be in a particular job like the police force or be super rich to retire after only 30 years.

However, I think the era when ordinary people could assume they a 'job for life' and could look forward to a final salary pension can't have lasted very long - I think it only really lasted until the 70's in private companies. It had definitely gone by the 90's.