America’s starting to look a lot older

First of five parts

Those who love Florida can take heart — a piece of the state soon will be coming to you.

In the next 25 years, the baby boomers will retire and the rest of the country will mirror Florida, where 20 percent of the population is 65 or older.

The first of 78.2 million boomers — defined as those born from 1946 to 1964 — turn 60 next year. They’ll become eligible for Medicare and full retirement under Social Security five years later. Some will begin to take early retirement under Social Security in just two years.

They fundamentally will alter the marketplace. Consultants specialize in advising companies how to market to the boomers and their $2 trillion in spending power. First Bob Dylan, 64, pitched Victoria’s Secret lingerie; now Paul McCartney, 63, sells Lexus luxury cars.

Long-term health care facilities expect a surge in demand, and morticians say their field will face a shortage as boomers die.

On the whole, boomers will be better off than any other retired generation in history. They are far better-educated, more technology-savvy and living healthier into their later years. They will have higher retirement incomes and a lower poverty rate.

Call it — or them — the new gray.

Their younger and older countrymen can only hope to fare as well, as politicians and interest groups grapple with fundamental questions about policy promises and how to pay the bills.

“We have a tremendous demographic tsunami descending on us, and we have to start preparing now,” says Paul Hodge, director of the Global Generations Policy Initiative at Harvard University. “American government, American society will be forced to make hard decisions. I think it will start in five years. There are going to have to be trade-offs.”

In other words, there are going to be some ch-ch-changes, in the generational catchphrase coined in 1971 by rocker David Bowie, who turns 59 on Jan. 8.

In this series, The Washington Times examines how the aging of America’s largest generation will rock the social-service and health-care systems created by their parents and grandparents’ generations — and how the boomers are living out their own vision of getting older.

The squeeze

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