Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
The eventual and inevitable retirement of the boomers will certainly have an economic impact, but there are some positives to the equation as well. Retirees consume, but do not produce. By consuming they create demand for goods and services, which in turn creates employment. As boomers age they will create jobs in health care and services that have to be locally delivered, and as they retire they will cease to compete in the employment market, which adds up to more available jobs locally. As boomers retire they will create vacant positions that have to be filled; if you're young and unemployed, as so many are these days, that's not a bad thing.
The problem with your analysis is that much of what retirees consume will be government entitlements for which there soon won't be any money. That will probably create additional public sector employment but at the cost of private sector employment. Not to mention the unholy trinity we'll see in the next two decades - namely, the end of the social security surpluses, a huge retirement bubble and an expensive and unsustainable Medicare program (~$40-70 Trillion in unfunded liabilities depending on who you believe.) While there certainly will be some positive impacts of the boomer retiree bubble, those impacts are dwarfed by the costs of promises made to those retirees.