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"The Next America" - Two Dramas In Slow Motion
That America has - or perhaps more accurately that the administration is desperate to create - a wealth divide, gender divide, and certainly ethnic divide, is hardly a secret. Yet all of those may pale in comparison to the transformation that the US is undergoing currently, according to the most recent Pew research study, one which finds that the world's one time superpower, is in the midst of two slow-motion dramas right now.
"Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.
Let’s start with what demographers call an “age pyramid.” Each bar represents a five year age cohort; with those ages 0-4 on the bottom and those ages 85 and older on the top. In every society since the start of history, whenever you broke down any population this way, you’d always get a pyramid.
But from 1960 to 2060, our pyramid will turn into a rectangle. We'll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5. This is the result of longer life spans and lower birthrates. It’s uncharted territory, not just for us, but for all of humanity. And while it’s certainly good news over the long haul for the sustainability of the earth’s resources, it will create political and economic stress in the shorter term, as smaller cohorts of working age adults will be hard-pressed to finance the retirements of larger cohorts of older ones."
But it is not just young vs old: it is the dramatically shifting ethnic composition of America that may have an even greater role in shaping social, immigration and economic policies in the decades ahead. In fact, as the Pew projection below shows, some time around 2040, whites will become a minority to all other ethnic groups residing in the US:
From Pew:
At the same time our population is going gray, we’re also becoming multi-colored. In 1960, the population of the United States was 85% white; by 2060, it will be only 43% white. We were once a black and white country. Now, we’re a rainbow.
Our intricate new racial tapestry is being woven by the more than 40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.
Because these tranformations happen tick by tock, without anyone announcing them with a drum roll or press conference, they are sometimes hard to perceive.
But every so often societies experience “aha” moments, when the change is right there in plain sight. We had several such moments in early 2014, as three iconic American brands, Coke, Chevy and Cheerios, rolled out ads during the Super Bowl and Olympics that were aimed at what one voice-over called "the new us."
Product advertisers aren’t in the business of making political statements. They’re certainly not in the business of making enemies. They must have known some of their images – interracial families, same-sex parents, “America the Beautiful” sung in several languages – would disturb some of their customers. But they also do their market research and look at their numbers. They know how fast the country is changing.
Where is the bulk of the shifting ethnic landscape coming from? Not surprisingly, from what is a very hot political topic these days: immigration.
Our modern immigrants are different from the big waves of newcomers who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, about nine-in-ten immigrants were from Europe. Today only about 12% are from Europe.
But some things don't change. No matter where they come from, immigrants are strivers. They’re optimists. And they tend to have a lot of kids. Our immigrant stock – that’s immigrants and their children – is projected to make up about 37% of our population by mid-century, the highest share in our history.
But understand: this isn’t new. We’ve always been a nation of settlers and immigrants. In this regard, the middle of the 20th century wasn’t the norm, it was the outlier.
Nowhere is the culmination of these two tectonic slow-motion "dramas" more evident than in the choice of America's president.
In the past few elections, the young/old partisan voting gap has been the biggest since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972. As recently as the year 2000, there had been no difference in the way young and old in America voted. Now, there's a chasm.
Six-in-ten young voters supported Barack Obama in his re-election bid in 2012, compared with just 47% of those in the age ranges of their parents (45 to 64) and 44% of their grandparents (65 and older). By race, six-in-ten white voters supported Republican candidate Mitt Romney, whereas more than nine-in-ten black voters supported Obama. Obama also captured more than 70% of the Asian-American and Hispanic vote.
When it comes to the age divide, the political split is clear: the youth are liberal, the elders conservative.
Millennials have voted more Democratic than older voters in the past five national elections. They came of age in the Bush and Obama eras and hold liberal attitudes on most social and governmental issues, as well as America’s approach to foreign policy.
Just as members of the Silent Generation are long-term backers of smaller government, Millennials, at least so far, are strong supporters of a more activist government.
In some social issues, such as legalizing marijuana and same-sex marriage, Millennials particularly stand out for their favorable views compared with other generations. Nearly seven-in-ten (68%) Millennials favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, compared with just 48% of Baby Boomers and just 38% of the Silent Generation.
Yet while the youth may like its pot and gay marriage, the one place where it is most likely to opine on these topics is FaceBook.
Then there’s the technology revolution. Today’s young are history’s first generation of digital natives. The online world isn’t something they’ve had to adapt to — it’s all they’ve ever known, and it’s their indispensable platform for social interactions and information acquisition.
Today’s old have been playing catch-up online, some more enthusiastically than others, but they have a long way to go. The typical Millennial who uses social media has 250 Facebook friends — making them five times “friendlier” than the smaller number of Silents who use social media.
But the most concerning aspect in the age divide is the number of working individuals required to support every safety net beneficiary: from 16 workers supporting every retirees in 1950, this number is now down to just 3.
But the status quo is unsustainable. Some 10,000 Baby Boomers will be going on Social Security and Medicare every single day between now and 2030. By the time everyone in this big pig-in-the-python generation is drawing benefits, we’ll have just two workers per beneficiary – down from three-to-one now, five-to-one in 1960 and more than forty-to-one in 1945, shortly after Social Security first started supporting beneficiaries.
The math of the 20th century simply won’t work in the 21st. Today's young are paying taxes to support a level of benefits for today's old that they have no realistic chance of receiving when they become old. And they know it – just 6% of Millennials say they expect to receive full benefits from Social Security when they retire. Fully half believe they’ll get nothing.
In light of all this "math", is it any wonder there is an increasing gap in the perceptions of not only the young versus old, but of America's diverse ethnic groups - each with their specific needs, and wants - all thrown into a boiling cauldron of record debt insolvency, in which the economic growth of the 20th century - that one distraction that masked the social unsustainability of social trends in the US for decades - is simply no longer possible?
There is much more in the full Pew study, however perhaps the one party whose input would be most germane here is the group of economist central planners who believe they know how to do everything to fix this country. We are talking of course about the largely cluless economists and other people who have never encountered the real world, who inhabit the Federal Reserve's Marriner Eccles building. Because if they too are as confused about how this all play out as the rest of us, then a crashing stock market is the least of our worries.
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The Social Security Administration has announced that the wage base for computing Social Security tax (OASDI) in 2014 increases to $117,000.
And now Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout, is calling for a SS tax on full salaries.
Karlin recently pointed out that “there is an inexplicable cap on collecting Social Security tax” above an income of $117,000 a year," but that if everyone “paid Social Security taxes on their full salaries the Social Security Trust Fund would likely be able to expand benefits.” In addition he cites another progressive who uses the word “plutocrats” to fool the rich – those now earning $117,000 and above:
“Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research, wrote that if everyone eligible paid all year long, ‘the Social security system would be solvent indefinitely and they [the plutocrats] still would be the richest and prettiest in all the land.’
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/lift-the-117-000-income-cap-on-social-security-taxes-and-benefits-could-likely-be-expanded/18419-lift-the-117-000-income-cap-on-social-security-taxes-and-benefits-could-likely-be-expanded
It should also be noted that the Associated Press wrote on August 07, 2012:
“People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It's a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/07/new-retirees-receiving-less-in-social-security-than-paid-in-marking-historic/
The seeds of Keynesian socialism are now in full bloom, sewn with passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913 that gave the federal government and its managers unrestricted access to the wealth of Americans.
can't wait for the moment an anchor baby who can barely speak spanish or english stands up and says: "they took 'er jobs!!"
the clusterfuck that is america only gets funnier by the day, and by funnier i mean morbidly 'what else can go wrong' funny.
Looking at these charts, I say, go "long" on...
a. More GILFs (good for old guys having sex)
b. Long-term biz models for health/sickness care and elder care, fewer teachers for the young
c. Self-reliance for some and more state-reliance for most ---> Requires more Gov and more taxes, not less
d. End of social dominance of "Family", and its re-definition into "Any legally-sanctioned and taxable biological merger". Am waiting for its logical extreme: return of Polygamy -- but probably only for the rich, in practice.
CONCLUSIONS:
1. Darwinism: Replace yourself, or be replaced. Cultures who multiply, dominate. IOW, the many stupid can beat the few smart. Unless the smart, organized and super-crafty (Elite/TPTB) climb to the very pinnacle of the Pyramid. A la Hunger Games society.
2. Those who control the LSR -- Last Strategic Resources (water, arable land, carbon fuels and strategic metals & minerals) -- control EVERYTHING. Note that the super-powers and their 'Friends' (friends of convenience) are jockeying for position now.
Plan accordingly.
Best comment of the day on this article. Up 100%
What the criminals of the DC US and their bankster master create is destruction--a whirlpool of destruction.
Their thefts change a no-zero-sum system of free production and trade into one of zero-sum; They live off of the labor and product of their victims, the American people.
Ultimately the criminals' thefts diminish and destroy returns on labor and capital causing widespread impoverishment. To continue in the their lifestyles, the criminals must increase the number and level of their schemes and scams. With more destruction of returns on labor and capital, impoverishment grows and society, trapped inside the criminals' whirlpool of destruction, moves that much closer to the drain and the sewer.
With each increase in the level of destruction caused by these criminals' crimes, they grow more desperate, but so do their struggling victims--The criminals struggle to take more while their victims struggle to keep what little they still have. As a result, the criminals must not only step up the number and levels of their schemes and scams, but their brutality as well; Theft begins to morph into murder.
Ultimately, when there is too little produced to support both the criminals and their victims, the only way for the criminals to maintain their lifestyle is with the elimination of their victims--The drain has been reached.
Society, the American people, must then decide to resist or fall into the drain to be devoured by the sewer of permanent poverty and enslavement..
The Four Rs
Rejection: Quit paying, quit obeying , quit playing
Revolution: It is inevitable, so prepare, as they are.
Retribution: Is there really any place for these sociopaths and criminals in a restored civil and Constitutional society?!
Restoration: Restore the Constitutional republic.
With banks like Goldman Sachs, who needs enemies..if you have not seen this one they are now the leader along with a few other shareholders trying to pressure Walgreens to move from the US to the UK for their headquarters to not have to pay US taxes..it the "Goldman Honey Badger" at work..trying to create the largest tax inversion ever done...so far Walgreens is a no go, afraid of the politics...hopefully they stay that way.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/04/influential-group-of-walgreens.html
"Hispanics" are not a racial group. Remember Zimmerman was identified as a "white Hispanic".
Attempting a 45 year extrapolation in a time of exponential change reaching some critical tipping points is quite an amusingly absurd exercise!
I'm convienced I'll either be some sort of Deus Ex style, enhanced "human" come 2050 or living underground after nuclear war.
Indeed, Suisse, the interesting facts are that either of those ARE possible! If civilization survives, then we are going to see technologies developed which are even more orders of magnitude more surprising than the ones which already have been developed. However, at the same time, we might not survive having done that?
Lockheed Skunk Works director says ESP is the key to interstellar travel (Video)
Posted by: Alejandro Rojas July 26, 2013
http://www.openminds.tv/lockheed-skunk-works-director-says-esp-is-the-ke...
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"Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray...The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion."
Neither of those things is the cause of what ails the American people. The cause of the American people's "stress" is the widepsread theft and criminality of the DC US governmnet and their bankster masters.
"Only those that are poor and fealrful of getting poorer fear and hate their neighbor."
The author and most of the commenters seem to be making the assumption that there will be an America in 2030. Kind of invalidates the discussion.
if you like your brenton woods III corporate globalism,
you can keep your brenton woods III corporate globalism.
.
( Rúgu? n? x?huan n? de bù lún dùn shùlín s?n q?yè quánqiú huà,
N? k?y? b?ochí nín de bù lún dùn shùlín s?n g?ngs? de quánqiú huà.)
Trouble ahead.
I play golf. Now who all wants to kill me? Identify yourselves.
what is your handicap?
(just a joke, i don't play)
For your continued good health, sell me your golf cart for an attractive price.
99.99% of what a human being does in the course of their life is irrelevant for sustaining the human race into the future. It doenst matter.
Unless man can figure out how to protect the human DNA from all the radiation we're being exposed to, to paraphrase Muller, the human race will die out around 2150 due to:
-mans inability to take care of himself due to sickness (think cancer)
-increasing genetic mutations and sterility
This explosion in the cancer rate was predicted by Muller almost 100 years ago by studying the effects of radiation on genetic mutiation, but it was the progression of mans exposure worldwide to damaging radiation after Hiroshima that prompted his prediction.
http://www.amazon.com/Mans-Future-Birthright-Science-Humanity/dp/0873950976
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And if you thinks that's not enough…
Talk to some of the so-called 'immigrants' who've been here for several decades. Listen how they long for their homeland.
More often that not, what you'll hear if you steer the conversation, is that they want to go back 'home' when they retire.
In Canada, these people are just champin' at the bit to retire, and bugger off back 'home' for 5 months, 27 days, so their free health care won't run out! (6 months is the cut-off. Libtards sucking for votes will change that.)
And they're gonna take their pensions and live like kings, back in the turd world.
The sucking sound when all that money leaves the US and Canada will be deafening.
And now, we've let in generations who don't view themselves as 'Americans'. They've used this great country like a toilet.
We've been betrayed by the politicians looking for votes, pandering.
God help us.
•?•
V-V
Only if they're allowed to bring it with them.
I can't blame baby boomers for unknowingly destroying the country. It's not their fault. There's a very well funded and highly organized effort to keep Americans as dumb and uninformed as possible. If you ever try to tell people that the government can run out of money, they act like you're from another planet. How could a government run out of money? Can't they just print more? Durrrrr. Yes they could, but then you're fucking retired people out of their savings.
I know the system is horribly broken when my mom's after-tax income is greater than mine. I'm a junior engineer. She's a retired secretary.
Promises to lower taxes got the vote every time.
No worries. In an underground .gov sponsored laboratory a group of Chemists are working on an "Old People" virus.
Better living through chemistry! (For the survivors,anyway)
First they need an antidote to save politicians, George Soros and other 'real' people.
A unicorn on TV told me there is no problem, just trust our monkeys in DC to do the democratic thing.
Are semites included in the white group?
hawaii is a microcosm of the future usa but we have the advantage of asian influence and immigrants. asians are more civilized thn white people or hispanics. it is hilarious to hear white people scream about discrimination when all their mainland white privilege disappears. miami is the same but the hispanics can be mean about it. white people don't have a chance in a non white world.
I also wanted to emigrate to a land of free to get my share of the dream. Then I looked at the requirements, paper work, stupid loteries and gave up. You are better off with fence jumping monkeys. Sincerely, European citizen
warning social security hit piece
Even the dumbest of US knows what happens when White Man loses ascendancy. Whether it is in the lunchroom, a neighborhood, the "zone" of a city, a Detroit, a Miami, or a South Africa.
And then there is the recent Bundy Ranch armed robbery. Where non producing whites turned their weapons on producing Whites. They guarded the theft and destruction of the Bundy Ranch's cattle and assaulted the Bundy Family. White man; what have you become?
I'm fortunate to have learned early in life that the only thing playing by the rules will get you is poor.