The Nov. 19 front-page article “Boomers’ vast wealth will be hard to replicate” reported that baby boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in assets.
At my 50th high school reunion, I reflected on fortune and fragility. My father helped write Medicaid and Medicare law, and our family benefited from inheritance. Not everyone has that kind of safety net.
Fiscal awareness is not optional; it is the lifeblood of democracy. Each day, the dollar in your pocket loses value while Washington funnels wealth upward. Without accountability and restraint, debt and inflation will continue to hollow out the middle class and mortgage the future.
We have moved from the Greatest Generation — who understood sacrifice and value — to a society that knows the price of everything and the unintended costs of nothing.
Prosperity depends on stewardship of our economy and our environment. Transparency, outrage and reform are not luxuries; they are life-sustaining. Without them, collapse is not just a possibility; it is a certainty.
Rob Arner, Edinburg, Virginia
A disease in price increases
In his Nov. 18 online op-ed, “An 8 percent lifetime ‘tax’ is coming for students,” Eric A. Hanushek argued that spending per student today is more than 2½ times what it was in 1970 yet test scores are unchanged. This is often presented as evidence of inefficiency. But this interpretation overlooks a central idea in economics known as Baumol’s cost disease.
A simple comparison helps illustrate the point. In the mid-1970s, experienced barbers in the United States typically earned only a few hundred dollars per week, which corresponds to roughly $5 to $6 per hour. Today, barbers earn roughly $19 per hour. Yet barbers do not cut three times as many heads per hour as they did in the 1970s. Their productivity has barely changed. If barbers were still paid 1970s wages, they would simply quit for better-paying jobs. And because society needs barbers, their wages must rise with wages in the broader economy.
Education follows the same logic. Teaching a class still requires one teacher and one class period. Rising education spending with flat test scores is not evidence of failure. If we do not insist that barbers produce multiple haircuts at once to justify higher pay, we should be cautious before applying a similar standard to teachers.
Jerome Taillard, Brookline, Massachusetts
The writer is a professor of finance at Babson College.
The prices of freedom
George F. Will’s Nov. 16 op-ed, “A great nation is reduced to fanciful hoping,” cited U.S. defense spending as about 3 percent of gross domestic product. This number excludes other departments’ military-related costs, such as Department of Veterans Affairs services. These costs bring the number closer to 5 percent of GDP. Although this other spending does less to stimulate economic growth, which was Will’s point, excluding the costs of previous military conflicts is akin to claiming the cost of car ownership ends when you drive it off the lot. That is exactly the sort of fuzzy math he detests.
Adam Hertzman, Pittsburgh
George F. Will quoted the most famous snippet from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address: “the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.” On the speech’s 50th anniversary, Ike’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower hosted a reception at the Newseum, at which she distributed copies of the actual teleprompter text. One word had been crossed out by an unknown hand, presumably at the last minute. It originally read: “military-industrial-congressional complex.”
Robert Hunter, Washington
Kill the bill
Regarding the Nov. 13 editorial “The penny is dead. Long live inflation.”:
Now that the penny is beginning its slow descent to oblivion, it is also time to look at the other side of the coin. The dollar bill should be phased out and replaced with an expanded circulation of the current dollar coin. Canada phased out one- and two-dollar bills in the past 40 years and instead uses one- and two-dollar coins; its smallest paper currency is now five dollars. Bills wear out quickly, singles in particular because of their frequent use.
Now that the U.S. Mint appears to have some excess production capacity, it would make a lot of “cents” to replace the dollar bill and possibly introduce a two-dollar coin as well.
Consumer prices will no doubt continue to rise, regardless of the party in power. President Donald Trump should be wary of placing his image on the proposed one-dollar commemorative coin next year. A Trump dollar would be a living reminder of the economic chaos many people experienced because of the recent government shutdown.
Andrew Sparberg, Oceanside, New York
Never forget
Following John Ficarra’s Nov. 11 op-ed, “My colleague at Mad magazine was a war hero. Who knew?” — and with Pearl Harbor Day coming up on Dec. 7 — Post Opinions wants to know: Did any friends, family members or colleagues turn out to be secret war heroes? How did you find out they were downplaying their personal history? Share your response, and it might be published in the letters to the editor section.
The post Baby boomers have hollowed out America appeared first on Washington Post.
