The Death of the Middle Class, Myth #1: No one can afford to save any more

Elizabeth Warren starts her talk off with the falling national savings rate. The savings rate has indeed fallen; in fact, it has become nonexistent. But Warren, like many commentators, implies that this is because families are too strapped to save. In fact, it's because of the two successive bubbles in the stock and housing markets. Families responded to the run up in their net worth by saving less. If you look at assets, rather than savings rates, people in the boomer generation--the generation that is in its prime savings years now--look pretty much like their parents.

Now, you could argue that this was foolish, and I in fact agree with you; Boomers need more savings than their parents, and they shouldn't have been so confident in massive paper gains. But that's not the same thing as saying that they were forced to forgo saving in order to provide for their kids, which is essentially what Elizabeth Warren argues. The asset model is a standard explanation that pretty much any economist in the country could give you; either Elizabeth Warren didn't ask any, or she ignored what they said. Even if you think this explanation is wrong, I think you need to explain why your model is a better fit.