"Casey-Kirschling was born one second after midnight on January 1, 1946, "

Why is January 1 the "official" start of the baby boom? Why not 9 months after V-E Day?

@TechnoDestructo: Good question.

@General admission: Hide gold in my mattress? I have a year's salary in gold, and a cheap-ass (but good enough) mattress from Ikea. If I was to let the two touch, they would explode in some quantum irony explosion.

I was joining my company's 401K last week and figuring out how much I should put aside at my age (40). The investing company allows the option of assuming you will have Social Security, or assuming you won't. I chose to figure things as if I wasn't going to get it... plan for the worst, hope for the best, as they say. As though Social Secuirty is the "best." Sigh.

I'm not planning on getting Social Security. Part of the joy of working for local government is PERS (public employee retirement system). I do hate the hunk of money the feds take out every paycheck though.

heh. i really like the tag "silver tsunami".

Of course, some baby boomers are already taking in social security funds, especially if under disability retirement.

Eh, I'll chip in my share for social security, but I don't expect to get anything from it... they're long going to run out before my turn is up.

run away!

They're not even edible. What good are they going to be when they cause the economy to collapse? Think we could train them to harvest gold and sell it to Chinese MMO players?

Those of us under 30 are paying into Social Security to help support our parents and/or grandparents. Even without a major overhaul, there will still be SOMETHING left when we reach 65, but it the benefits will probably be 50-60% of what Social Security pays now. If we plan not to receive any, we should be pleasantly surprised 40 years from now.

Social Security was never designed to give full retirement benefits, anyway, just enough to get by. We don't want to be throwing older folks out on the street just because they didn't plan for their pension to collapse.

@AnitraSmith:

Social Security was never designed to give full retirement benefits, anyway, just enough to get by.

When the pension system was healthy (and before rich bastards started stealing from their employees), and people could work at one company for 40 years and be provided for in their retirement, SS benefits were adequate. Now it seems like those of us who don't start saving agressively in our 20s and 30s are going to be in trouble when we're 65.

Soylent Green is made of baby boomers?

@baa: "Silver Tsunami" is a nice tag, but I stole it from the article—so I can't claim credit for it.

Sorry to disappoint the lady, but my dad was born in February 1946 and he already applied for social security.