I always considered myself more of a millennial than Gen-X, because British Gen-X got student grants and free tuition, but I got the first year of tuition fees and loans. My whole life I have been seeing open doors slammed shut in the name of the economy.
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Sure sounds like Gen-X to this American’s ear. 
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Gen-X had it bad here, but not as bad as what was to come. They got to experience the setup for neoliberalism, I just got the neoliberalism. I got “do well and there is a system waiting to take you through university” only to get to 16 and be told “No! there is no room for you anymore”. If there is such a thing as generations (and I am not convinced) my experiences were not the same as those of someone just a year older.
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Not usually, but my youngest technically is Gen-Z (all the usual disclaimers about how these generational tags are nonsense) and I’m a Boomer.
And yes, I was labeled ‘geriatric’ in the maternity ward. That’s the medical term for it!
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This is correct. The parents of Gen Z kids are usually Gen X. And yet it seems to remain the case that the people who seem to enjoy this kind of “humor” are disproportionately Boomers. I’m sure this is related to your point about reactionaries.
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Gen Xers in the U.S. knew they were screwed in the long run due to Reaganism but some of us older ones still got to enjoy the dregs of the post-war economic anomaly. I’m still willing to wager that the moment enough of the Boomer generation dies out (10-15 years from now) is the moment that the federal government will start doing the politically “unthinkable” and start reducing Social Security benefits collected by Gen Xers entering retirement age.
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I know. The problem is that I was born in 1980. 10-15 years ago I wasn’t considered Gen X (which used to bug me because I was so close). For a while I was lumped in with millennials (in fact I’m featured in an article on millennials giving up X for Y). Then Xennials. Now I guess I’m Gen X. It’s really arbitrary especially because…
… this ^^^
The more I started to look at what millennials were doing and how (and why) they were doing it, the more I realized I followed that path without even meaning to. I studied one of those fields that didn’t have a lot of prospects at the time I graduated (unless you were willing to work for free or basically free) and eventually figured out if I was going to succeed, I needed to build my own thing to make it happen.
My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t associate with millennials at all, despite being a handful of months older than me 
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Me, too. I’m squarely Gen-X and my son is squarely Gen-Z. 
@gracchus: Perhaps they can manage removing the income cap, but I think they’re smart enough to realize cutting our benefits will make raising the benefits back up for themselves very difficult, if not impossible. Besides, with a “full” retirement age of 70 right now, most of us will probably apply earlier for reduced benefits just to make sure we get something for everything we’ve been paying in since we were 16 (sooooo many of us had jobs as teens).
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My sense is they’ll be counting on the majority of Millenials and Gen-Zers being too young to worry about retirement. Given the rise of the gig economy and part-time work replacing traditional full-time work for people now under 40, they may not be so sensitive to how much they paid in.
I also can’t rule out the possibility that the feds cut the benefits in the process of eliminating all social welfare programmes permanently to fund a neoliberal version of a UBI. Automation and increased productivity is only going to continue to reduce employment opportunities in the 10-year-plus time frame.
You make a good point about retirement age. The first step will probably be to raise the full benefits age from 70 to 75 and the early start date from 62 to 67 or 68, supposedly in the name of longer lifespans and working years. However the manage it, I’ve been operating for many years on the assumption that the duopoly parties’ establishments will be more than willing to screw over a demographic that lacks electoral clout if the timing and conditions line up.
