Why baby boomers borrow instead of saving
Imagine hearing every day throughout your childhood that a nuclear attack might incinerate you at any moment. Imagine schoolteachers holding drop drills and handing out maps showing the best routes to nearby fallout shelters. Imagine politicians from all major parties assuming that Russian Communists would attack us at any moment (and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev screaming, “We will bury you!” on TV). We all expected to die in a nuclear war. And even if we survived, we didn’t expect our society and economic system — or bank accounts — to make it through the holocaust.
Today the word “holocaust” usually refers to Nazi mass-murders in the 1930s and early 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s U.S. vocabulary it usually had the word “nuclear” in front of it, and it was something a head of government in a nuclear-armed country would start by pushing “the button.”
The 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, didn’t seem at all far-fetched.
Troops on their way to a potentially lethal combat zone have traditionally tried to jam as much living — in the hedonistic sense — into their last pre-battle hours as they could, without worrying about saving for the future or if a couple of cigarettes might give them lung cancer someday.
When you expect to die tomorrow, what’s the point of worrying about what life will be like when you’re 70?
We were assured, over and over again, that in a war of mass destruction there were no front lines. We were all at risk. Those nutsy Commies hated Our Way of Life so much that they would wipe it out with nuclear missles if they couldn’t turn the whole world into a Communist state. We heard this from Democrats, from Republicans, and from the Communists themselves — except the Communists claimed they expected the U.S. to launch the first nuclear strike and that they would only destroy the U.S. in retaliation.
A famous campaign slogan: “Better Dead than Red”
Another famous campaign slogan: “Better Red than Dead”
Note that the alternative to nuclear destruction was Communist domination — and under a Communist regime our savings would become just as worthless as they’d be in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Not only that, we’d all be reduced to poverty anyway, forced to wear grey, shapeless clothes and stand in endless lines to buy basics like toothpaste and hamburger on the few days they were available (in limited quantities) at state-run stores.
We saw plenty of pictures and films of Soviet life on TV, so we knew Communism was not a fun way to live. We also knew — from TV, books, and newspapers — that anyone in a Communist country who complained about the drabness of their “worker’s paradise” got executed or sent to brutal concentration camps.
“Today we party, for tomorrow we die”
This could be a generational anthem. Even those among the born-in-the-40s-and-50s crowd who planned for the future grew up with a deep (and sometimes deeply hidden) core of disbelief in that future.
Savings? Why bother? You weren’t going to be able to use those savings if the bank and government were reduced to radioactive rubble (or taken over by Communists), would you?
Take on too much debt? Why not? If the bank and government were reduced to radioactive rubble (or taken over by Communists), you wouldn’t have to pay it back, would you?
Now you know — in case you didn’t already — why we have millions of middle-aged Americans with plenty of consumer debt, oversized homes (and mortgages), and little or no savings.
This “live for the moment” mentality also explains the short-term thinking that now seems to permeate nearly all government and business decision-making.
But don’t let any of this bother you.
Have a great day.
Today.
For who knows what tomorrow may bring?
The song Today was a major 1964 hit by the New Christy Minstrels, later covered by John Denver and many others.