“Boomergeddon” is a useful, breezy primer on the problems confronting the U.S. as its Baby Boomer population ages and face what the author believes to be a rising firestorm of government debt and entitlement programs that the nation can no longer afford.
The author, Jim Bacon, is a journalist with a libertarian point of view who has little use for government, swears by balanced budgets and has a bit of a Calvinist streak regarding personal responsibility. His book seems not at all intended to be the final verdict on the enormously negative scenarios that Bacon sees, but rather as an introduction to some difficult issues that people born right after World War II through the early 1960s will likely face as they become elderly.
In this role, the book is a benefit. Bacon is an excellent writer and breezes through coming demographic shifts and complex economic problems such as an overload of sovereign debt, an unworkable managed care health system, far too much government spending, and so on. In this sense, Bacon is performing a real service for the student of introductory current events since he lays out a number of issues in an easy-to-comprehend manner.
The book falls short for the same reasons. It appears to be hastily written with an eye to looming November elections (Republicans have suddenly discovered deficit spending after eight years of George W. Bush). Rather than going out and interviewing real people, Bacon instead relies too much on cut and paste articles mostly from conservative or libertarian outfits such as the Cato Institute.
More sophisticated readers will find some of his points obvious. It should come as no surprise that many people in the Washington area voted for Obama which is a pattern similar to other large, diverse metropolitan areas. It’s not exactly news that the District of Columbia area is chock-a-block with lobbyists. The average newspaper reader is well aware that subprime spending and overuse of credit cards contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In this, he underplays the role of huge and lightly-regulated financial service companies in pushing credit instruments on a reluctant public .
Bacon gives interesting background on managed care, but this may be his weakest chapter. He’s absolutely right in noting that our current system has no price transparency — an important point to a free market advocate like Bacon. And, he pushes quality control as Obama’s solutions do, but he makes a big mistake by believing that medical outcomes of human beings are really widgets or jet engines that can be measured by such in-vogue quality management trends as Six Sigma used in the manufacturing sector. It might have helped if Bacon had spent a week or even a day in a hospital to see how things really work. Very few people can afford medical concierge services that he sees as a promising free market trend.
And, while noting that Obamacare is designed to give millions of mostly poor and uninsured Americans access to health insurance, he somehow acts as if lower income people don’t deserve health care. This same strain of class elitism is evident in his discussion of credit cards when he makes such statements as “Master Cards for the masses.” Credit card use expanded beyond the wealthy for other reasons than that the great unwashed wanted to live like kings. Financial institutions have forced people to drop cash or checks because they are more expensive to process.
A few other points. Bacon hop-scotches the world looking at rising troubles points, sort of like the “Sit Rep” section that Soldier of Fortune magazine used to publish. Some of this is interesting, but it is doubtful how useful it is to his “Boomergeddon” point. The squabbles. for instance, of tiny Nagorno-Karabakh are of minor relevance to the foreign policy of the U.S. and the Boomers it serves, although Armenians and Azeris might be interested.
The core of the book are the near doomsday scenarios that Bacon presents. He envisions 13 (curious number) steps on the road to Boomergeddon. These start in 2011 with slower than expected growth, continued government spending, a currency crisis in 2017, a recession the following year, a credit downgrade in 2022, failed bond auctions in 2027 and then, (ka-boom), Boomergeddon.
Very few professional economists I know are able to predict what’s happening two quarters from now, let alone in 2020. Bacon is a journalist, not a trained economist. Curiously for someone so anti-government, he may be paying too much attention to what governments do. Indeed, large, state-less private corporations have been on the scene for at least two decades How they and their financiers rock and roll with the times will likely have much more of an impact. Governments will likely have much less of a say on economics two decades from now than they do today.
Still, Bacon has done an admirable job of putting together some very big thoughts for the average reader. If his intention is to spark debates, he’s done us all a good service.
Peter Galuszka
(submitted to Amazon.com)