Yes, losing your job, your house, your life savings, your health insurance and any semblance of economic security might have something to do with it. Ya think? I've spent more time in the past five years talking friends off the ledge:

Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade, prompting concern that a generation of baby boomers who have faced years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers may be particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted harm.

More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.

Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.

Surprising to whom? The well-paid denizens of the Village's New York chapter?

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.

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Not that we didn't already know this in our guts, but now they've done a study to prove it. The Atlantic reports that employers intentionally screen out the long-term unemployed even if their resumé has the same work experience as someone unemployed for less than six months.

The Atlantic:

But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they'd been out of work, how often they'd switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.

It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.

The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven't been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven't moved between jobs that much. But how long you've been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad's paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who'd been out of work shorter.

Look at that again. As long as you've been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don't have experience. But after you've been out of work for six months, it doesn't matter what experience you have. Quite literally. There's only a 2.12 percentage point difference in callback rates for the long-term unemployed with or without industry experience. That's compared to a 7.13 and 8.95 percentage point difference for the short-and-medium-term unemployed. This is what screening out the long-term unemployed looks like. In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer.

Don't get me started on how people who are out of work, female, and over age 50 do with trying to get a job anywhere. My data is purely anecdotal, of course, but it's even worse than what this study proves. After all, why should employers hire expensive employees when they can find young people lined up at the door to fill the jobs?

Here's a report from 2011. Nearly two years later the economy is recovering for everyone but the long-term unemployed, especially if they're over 50.

The other day, I talked to an old friend I hadn't spoken to in months -- mostly because she's a wingnut and I couldn't take her pre-election insanity. So one of the first things she does is start complaining that her 40-year-old daughter's Social Security taxes went up "$200 a week and that's a lot when she's paying $55,000 a year for her daughter in college." (Her daughter makes $250K a year.) Through clenched teeth, I said, "Your daughter makes ten times what I do, and I wish I made enough to pay those taxes. I really don't want to hear her whining." Which shut her up for a bit.

My world and that of the people I know is much more like this:

In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.

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Possibly in the top ten things that drive me crazy: Pundits who pretend retirement of the Baby Boom generation is somehow a surprise. Fareed Zakaria is the latest, and his title is one of the dumbest. In a recent article entitled "The Baby Boom and Financial Doom", Zakaria takes liberals to task for daring to criticize Pete Peterson while ignoring the impending doom of baby boomers.

Only, he's dead wrong. Our generation, the so-called Baby Boom generation, already took the budget hit for our massive costs when we retire. Not only did we pay for our parents, but we've also paid for ourselves, and it's really not our fault that lawmakers have short memories and shorter fuses. But that doesn't stop Zakaria, who writes:

The facts are hard to dispute. In 1900, 1 in 25 Americans was over the age of 65. In 2030, just 18 years from now, 1 in 5 Americans will be over 65. We will be a nation that looks like Florida. Because we have a large array of programs that provide guaranteed benefits to the elderly, this has huge budgetary implications. In 1960 there were about five working Americans for every retiree. By 2025, there will be just over two workers per retiree. In 1975 Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid made up 25% of federal spending. Today they add up to a whopping 40%. And within a decade, these programs will take up over half of all federal outlays.

Some argue that Peterson has been banging this drum for years--decades --and yet the grim reaper has not arrived. But we have postponed the problem by borrowing heavily for three decades, and there is a limit to how long we can keep increasing debt, which now stands at 100% of GDP. The budgetary strains are already apparent. Federal spending on everything other than entitlements and defense has been steadily shrinking for decades. Cities and states are in a downward spiral. A recent report from the National Governors Association points out that Medicaid is now the single largest item on state budgets and has grown by over 20% each of the past two years. As a result, spending on everything else is being slashed, from police and poverty programs to public education.

Once again, I reiterate: These numbers are no surprise. The whole reason many of us were screwed on our Social Security retirement date was to account for the large numbers of retirees. Here's one thing we weren't counting on, however: Being terminated and never rehired beginning around age 50 or so. The rates of contribution were raised in the 80s in order to anticipate our retirement while making sure our parents also retired with some safety net under them.

In his apologetic for Peterson, Zakaria once again restates the usual mantra of the rich: In order to keep the safety net, we have to slash big wide holes in it.

"I want to strengthen the safety net for the poor. But to do so, we have to reform entitlements, because they are simply not sustainable in their current form," Peterson says. "The elderly population is doubling, and health care costs are rising rapidly." His foundation is making the control of health care costs its No. 1 priority. "But we need to start making changes soon, because the longer we wait, the more painful will be the eventual changes," he says.

Cleanse your palate and read Nancy Altman's counterpoint:

The Social Security surplus that began to accumulate in 1984 was planned and designed to be drawn down as needed to supplement FICA revenues and high-earner taxes to meet the boomers' projected benefits. So, that expected program development is not a sign of prospective collapse. We are fully capable of winning the battle of the baby boom bulge.

Obamacare is a start toward reducing those health care costs, but the whole premise assumes that Social Security and Medicare are programs for the poor. They're not; they're programs for everyone.

My questions for Peterson and Zakaria: Why shouldn't this country spend a larger portion of its budget on the people, given that the people made those contributions and funded current retirees' benefits along with their own? Second, perhaps we should be considering the cost side of things rather than the benefit side. Why, for example, should those of us unfortunate enough to be born in a large generation be penalized for that with cuts, while income inequality is at its greatest margin since the 1920s?

Finally, why should any of us agree to have pain inflicted upon us at the recommendation of a billionaire who has never for one single day understood what it feels like to be the ones who pay for everything, while being shamed for expecting to receive what we paid for?

Someone needs to fill these guys in on history and specifically, that no one fell asleep for the last 40 years while baby boomers were aging. They were happy to profit from us for all these years. Now they're complaining? Meh.

You have to watch this video to see how insidiously the Villagers are spreading the narrative: Those Baby Boomers are sucking all the money out of the Treasury because they're just so damned selfish! And only some of them served in Viet Nam! Watch as Diane Sawyer puts on her Very Serious Face and says the deficit is a big problem. Pay attention to the lies scattered throughout. Dear God, it's going to be another one of those years:

The first baby boomers will turn 65 Jan. 1, beginning a flood of applications for Medicare benefits that experts fear could drain the economy and hold political repercussions for President Obama.

The baby boomer generation marked a huge reproductive uptick between 1946 and 1964, when 76 million children were born, creating a higher demand across the nation for schools and consumer products, and an upheaval in popular culture.

But this post-World War II generation's overwhelming demand on the Medicare system could possibly leave future generations with a bigger bill.

Medicare currently covers 46 million people, costing the government about $500 billion a year. But when the last of the iconic generation reaches 65 in about 20 years, more than 80 million people will be eligible for Medicare coverage, although the number of working people paying into the program will have decreased from 3.5 per person receiving benefits to 2.3.

The increase in the number of people eligible for benefits paired with the rising costs of health care and longer life spans threatens the program's sustainability. It could force the administration and Congress to come up with a plan to reduce costs, either by cutting benefits or raising taxes.

A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that 61 percent of Americans favored raising taxes in lieu of slashing benefits. The poll included adults in their 20s, who potentially could end up paying more into the system.

Fifty-one percent opposed the idea of giving older Americans a fixed payment to use against the cost of private insurance, an option made popular by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Sixty-three percent opposed raising the age of eligibility.

Scrutiny Hooligans has more.

This Wall St. Journal article also says that despite the cutbacks in teaching jobs even for programs like Teach for America, the number of students working toward teaching certifications is rising:

Jacqueline Frommer thought her career path was set when she landed her dream job last summer teaching fourth grade in Pompano Beach, Fla. Last month, she got laid off. Ms. Frommer, 25 years old, said in college she was told teaching was among the steadiest jobs around. Now "there is no job security anymore," she said.

In a sign of how severe the employment downturn is getting, even schoolteachers, an occupation once viewed as recession proof, are feeling the pain.

Education jobs grew steadily in recent years amid rising enrollment and government efforts to reduce class sizes. Now the increase in teaching positions has leveled off as school districts struggle with budget pressures. The demographic bulge caused by children of baby boomers -- the so-called echo boom -- has also begun to wane.

Los Angeles Unified School District laid off 2,500 teachers this spring. Broward County, Fla., Ms. Frommer's district, cut 400 school jobs. Rochester, N.Y., laid off 300 teachers.

Other districts have avoided cuts by negotiating pay reductions and enacting furloughs and hiring freezes. In June, education jobs actually ticked up 0.5% nationally to just under 3.1 million on a seasonally adjusted basis. But the number of education-related jobs has declined in six of the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That contrasts with annual growth of about 3% over the past 15 years in the education field. In the past year, education jobs have grown at about half that rate. Most in demand are teachers in math, science and special education. College instructors have also been in high demand.

Many of the layoffs came in June as teachers prepared to say goodbye to their students for summer. Union and state rules require schools to give teachers notice before the end of the school year if their jobs won't be there in the fall.

Heather Clutter, an elementary teacher in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., learned 15 minutes before the end of the last day of school in early June that she was one of 200 teachers being laid off in the area -- just weeks after learning she was pregnant.

"You always think of teaching as a safe profession. Once you get in, you're there, you'll be able to retire," she said. "Not so much right now."

It would make more sense for the government to keep extending unemployment benefits until the recession lets up, because the effects of this poverty-inducing trend are far more harmful to the long-term economy than putting out cash now to keep people afloat:

Reporting from Washington -- Instead of seeing older workers staying on the job longer as the economy has worsened, the Social Security system is reporting a major surge in early retirement claims that could have implications for the financial security of millions of baby boomers.

Since the current federal fiscal year began Oct. 1, claims have been running 25% ahead of last year, compared with the 15% increase that had been projected as the post-World War II generation reaches eligibility for early retirement, according to Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration.

Many of the additional retirements are probably laid-off workers who are claiming Social Security early, despite reduced benefits, because they are under immediate financial pressure, Goss and other analysts believe.

The numbers upend expectations that older Americans who sustained financial losses in the recession would work longer to rebuild their nest eggs. In a December poll sponsored by CareerBuilder, 60% of workers older than 60 said they planned to postpone retirement.

Goss said it remained unclear whether the uptick in retirements would accelerate or abate in the months ahead. But another wave of older workers may opt for early retirement when they exhaust unemployment benefits late this year or early in 2010, he noted.

The ramifications of the trend are profound for the new retirees, their families, the government and other social institutions that may be called upon to help support them.

On top of savings ravaged by the stock market decline and the loss of home equity, many retirees now must make do with Social Security benefits reduced by as much as 25% if they retire at age 62 instead of 66.

"When the recession ends and the economy bounces back, there may be a band of people for whom things will never be the same again. They'll still be paying the price for 10, 20, 30 years down the road," said Cristina Martin Firvida, director of economic security for AARP, the nation's largest membership organization for people 50 and older.

If this is true, this is exactly why it would be such a good idea to lower the Medicare age to 55 - because otherwise, industry paints a target on every Boomer back:

Every day there's another layoff announcement, so Sean O'Grady finds himself confused about why his Philadelphia-based recruiting company, CareerTV USA Inc., is doing so well.

"We had to shake our heads at that," he said, "because we're doing our best sales ever, and we had our best quarter at the end of 2008."

So O'Grady started asking his clients to explain why they are bothering to recruit in these times, even when, in some cases, they are cutting back on hiring.

What he learned and what he is seeing "is the layoff of the baby-boom generation. Companies are filling those holes with bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college graduates.

"They are essentially trying to hire people they can pay less and get a lot of energy and enthusiasm," said O'Grady, 26, a senior producer at CareerTV.

[...] One was Andrew Vavra, 55, of Schwenksville, an unemployed marketing project manager. He had been to a another job fair recently "and no one under 40 was there," he said. "It made me angry.

"They are laying off older workers to reduce their pension exposure and their health-plan exposure," he said. "The young people are being hired in without medical plans and pension plans."

What is clear, said economist Joel Naroff, is that companies are using the recession to reconfigure their workforces - and that is what they should do.

"There is a popular phrase - 'don't waste a perfectly good crisis'," said Naroff, chief economist with TD Bank N.A. "The idea behind that is you can do things you couldn't do under a normal set of circumstances. You have the opportunity to make the changes that you really should have made before."

Companies that cut jobs just to shave expenses will not be prepared when the economy rebounds. The cuts should be strategic to position the companies for the future, said Naroff, of Holland, Bucks County.

If companies are going to announce layoffs of 5,000, he said, it does not give them much more of a publicity problem if they say they will lay off 5,500, with the idea of getting rid of "dead wood" or entire unproductive divisions. "It looks the same to the public."

"Now they've been given free hand to do it," Naroff said. In a sense, "the economy gives them cover."

Reax to his USA TODAY editorial.

Then there's Jonah Goldberg's Op-Ed in USA Today. He used the occasion not to try to come to grips with that war but denounce those -- mainly, he said, "liberal baby boomers" -- who on a "near-daily" basis link Iraq to Vietnam. He said they are simply filled with "nostalgia" for their glory days of antiwar hedonism.

Attempting to bolster this argument, Goldberg charged the boomers aren’t even in touch with the facts: namely, the Vietnam war wasn’t among the most unpopular in our history. His one piece of evidence: someone named Sol Tax of the University of Chicago who apparently claimed, in a 1968 study, that Vietnam ranked as only "the fourth or seventh least-popular war in American history." read on

This is priceless.

via The DC Media Girl

via Daily Howler

On Sunday, Will made a plainly inaccurate claim in his Washington Post op-ed column. He said Social Security would be running shortfalls as early as the year 2012:

WILL (3/13/05): Today the government is partially funded by that surplus of Social Security tax revenue over outlays, a fact disguised by politicians talking rot about Social Security being an "insurance" program with a "trust fund" in a "lock box." But between 2011 and 2016, Social Security outlays will exceed revenue by $32 billion, and the sums will rapidly increase during the cascading retirements of baby boomers.

Say what? read on

We'll need a score card to track how much mis-information is being put out there. Maybe we'll set up an NCAA bracket.