NEW YORK: Baby boomers are hoarding the world’s wealth and depriving their children of future living standards on par with their own, a new report argues.
The think tank has crunched the numbers on the growing wealth gap between generations, and found that while boomers have never had it better, adults aged under 35 are poorer than they were just eight years ago.
The report has found households whose main residents are aged between 55 years old and 64 years were $173,000 richer in real terms in 2011-12 than the same cohort was eight years earlier.
A household with residents aged 65 to 74 was $215,000 better off.
Meanwhile, householders with people aged 25 to 34 saw their wealth fall.
“It’s been driven by a number of things,” said the report.
“Particularly rising house prices, very rapidly increasing government spending on older households, governments running very substantial deficits that ultimately younger generations are going to have to pay for.
“Added to that, an outlook in which economic growth may be pretty slow for at least the next 10 years and possibly longer than that.”
The report says the “generational bargain” is at risk.
“In most societies, every generation has wound up paying taxes when they’re of working age, and then when they retire the government supports them,” said the report.
“They take out, as it were, from the government pot and, indeed, every generation has taken out more than they have put in.”
The report concludes it is an unsustainable trend…