Boomers have paid their dues to society

I am having trouble empathising with the bleating about whose taxes will fund the ageing baby-boomer bunch in the near future. Such mean-hearted tripe. Such chutzpah - the high-chair set having a hissy fit just thinking about the load it's going to have to bear.

So, who started it and how do we stop it is what I want to know. I feel like digging out my pewter jewellery and hurling it at the next Generation-X pet who complains that his or her taxes will be supporting the likes of me because I haven't been clever enough to save for my Zimmer frame.

OK, so a decent slice of your taxes are going to have to keep us in the style we invented and will insist upon while there's breath in our used, abused (and increasingly refused) bodies. Pardon us for making up 39.76 per cent of the population.

Imagine a world without teenagers. Who invented the phenomenon? We did. The adolescent baby boomers were the social malcontents of the 50s who cut loose from the oppressive ruck and insisted on being recognised as individuals with a right to be listened to, marketed to and feared by a conservative Yesterday because we were Tomorrow - our own tomorrow, and yours.

Imagine if we had not rebelled. Elvis would have been sent back to his mum to have his mouth washed out. He would still be singing gospel in some clapboard church in Memphis, telling his grandkids how a rush of blood to his head a long time ago made him do some foolish things with his hips.

Look at it this way: the money you've been saving on dentistry - because we gave you flouride in your drinking water - is the equivalent of the tax rise you'll need to come up with on our behalf.

Between sorting my vinyls and renovating my sea-change home, I pause to wonder: why all the ingratitude and grumbling resentment? Should we have left off trying to make this a better world? Should we have just climbed the corporate ladders and left the multinationals to rip down the trees and put in their car parks?

I haven't even touched the 'f' word. This fight alone would be reason enough to drop a donation in as we pass the hat around. I'm not talking flares and fondue, either. Of course the boomers gave the world them. Just as we gave it fast-food, rock'n'roll, heart transplants, aerobics, tantric sex and the F-111. OK, so the Concorde proved to be a dud and the AK-47 was nasty, the multi-function polis never eventuated and body shirts were neither here nor there. But imagine a world without tampons, child care and equal wages.

Yes, I'm talking about feminism. Boomers went in hard on that one, and the Gen -ers who hold up half the sky today need to be reminded with each pay cheque. But that's an argument for another day. Why not just pay up and do it with a smile? Life's too short for hassles, man. Dig?

Okay, let's demolish your argument one point at a time...

56,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and that was tragedy, yes. Of course, they wouldn't have died in vain if their colleagues hadn't been rioting in the streets and rooting for the other side. Then again, perhaps if the boomers had had any sense whatsoever, they would have made a concious effort to get Kennedy and Johnson to end the damn thing as soon as possible, with victory.

Instead, boomers take credit for "ending an unjust war" that saw more more people killed after it was over. BTW, my father served two tours of duty in Vietnam (1966,1968) and was at Khe Sahn (26th Marines). I'm fourth generation military myself.

Boomers are so proud that they fought "the establishment", until, of course they became the establishment themselves and forgot all about the summer of love. Once they grew up they realized that money was, of course, a vital necessity. Amazing what happens when you are forced to face reality.

As for a rising stock market, considering that between 1945 and about 1970, this was the only industrial country that had not been bombed flat, or under direct threat of invasion by the meancing Red Hoardes, the US was in the unusual position of supplying virtually all manufactured goods for the other 4/5th of the globe. We also produced a significant proportion of our own energy and raw materials at that time. By the way, I've worked on Wall Street for the last 20 years and the stock market is a load of crap. Your average stock broker is little more than a licensed bookie in an expensive suit and numbers can always be made to lie (just ask the Federal Gub'mint or Enron --- both run by boomers, no less).

The "rising" stock market has occured during a time in which real wages have sunk, people work longer hours for less return, we've had inflated prices and returns in speculative "bubbles" (tech, biotech, and now real estate), and the introduction of the 401(k) (which by the way, was invented by someone from the WWII generation). In the meantime, every attempt to restore some semblance of reality to economics has been thwarted by baby boomers. We do not live in a free market society anymore, unless you deal in pornography, prostitution or illicit narcotics. Our grandparents won WWII, but Nazi-style economics and government-run industry survived.

Right now, we live in a world where the price of oil continues to rise, further strangling economic growth, in part because the Boomers refused to accept nuclear power. They feared what they did not understand. The same people went ahead and made various areas of uninhabtable land safe for caribou and spotted owls and such, while untapped energy lies just underground. Right now, the United States Military turns out hundred ofqualified nuclear engineers who could be working ater their service, running small, clean and powerful plants that will keep boomers from dying in the summer heat, like elderly folks do in France. The self-same boomers made welfare a self-perpetuating prophecy, creating a new plantation in the heart of American cities, while marching for civil rights to salve their souls. The same boomers removed the societal stigmas attached to out-of-wedlock births, unwed mothers, homosexuality, drug use, etc, etc, etc, until we now live in a country where practically every day, someone sues someone for the right to marry his daschund.

Your generation is full of such sophomoric contradictions: claiming credit for a "robust" ecomony that creates nothing other than cigarettes and Doritos (check Wal-Mart, everything else comes from Chima), having the "courage to speak truth to power" about Vietnam and Civil Rights when you did nothing of the sort. The worst boomer excess has to be the argument that says that simply because you will live to be twice the age of your grandparents generation that you must be paid simply for being alive.

Listen, I don't begrudge anyone anything they're entitled to by rights. I do have a probem, however, with people taking advantage of a system that would get any Italian slapped with a RICO statute -- the Ponzi scheme of Social Security.

So here's what I would propose -- you can have whatever you paid into the system, in cash, with a modicum of interest, in a lump sum. however, you cannot do anything with that money except put it into some retirement account or some concrete investment. The onus to save for your reclining years will now be squarely on you. We then exempt you and your employer from having to pay SS taxes on your behalf, and the rest of us whippersnappers won't have to support you in your golden years of chasing blue plate specials and playing the nickle slots in Atlantic City. We then give my generation at least half of what we've paid in and get rid of the SS tax, unless people still want to opt in. I know more about how to invest it than the government or my "investment specialist" does.

Then Social Secrity dies the death that all socialist-inspired schemes deserve to, you get to build that nest eggg that will fund your respirator and cemetary plot, and for which your children will be more than happy to fight over when you've shuffled off this mortal coil. That, of course, assumes they don't decide to pull the plug for you. I, of course, get to keep more of what I rightfully earned and your grubby hands are out of my pockets.

56,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and that was tragedy, yes. Of course, they wouldn't have died in vain if their colleagues hadn't been rioting in the streets and rooting for the other side. Then again, perhaps if the boomers had had any sense whatsoever, they would have made a concious effort to get Kennedy and Johnson to end the damn thing as soon as possible, with victory.

Instead, boomers take credit for "ending an unjust war" that saw more more people killed after it was over. BTW, my father served two tours of duty in Vietnam (1966,1968) and was at Khe Sahn (26th Marines). I'm fourth generation military myself.

Pretty obvious that a generation of Dan Rather style propaganda has sunk deeply into you and you have nothing but Hollywood images of what your parents generation was about. A few thousand Boomers went to Canada. More than 5 million served in the US military like your dad. I don't even know of one Boomer who "protested" the war. For every maggot infested commie hippie on the streets, there were thousands who supported their country. For every leftist media hyped Jane Fonda, there were hundreds of nameless Boomers who hated her guts and who put Ronald Reagan in office and then turned a half century of leftist congressional rule into what looks to be a permanent Conservative majority. That was only possible because of Boomers. It wasn't the "Greatest Generation" that did it. I know those people very well. They were my parents generation and they worshiped at the temple of FDR and the Democrat Party and a great many of them have never done anything other than pull the straight Democrat lever.

As to Social Security, if you are capable of simple addition, you will understand that not even one Boomer is eligible for it now, and none will be for another few years. It's the so-called Greatest Generation who were loyal to the Democrat party who demanded all the increased benefits. It's been the Boomers who have paid for those increased benefits for their entire careers and who realized long ago that Social Security was a Ponzi Scheme that would never take care of them. Those of us who had the means have planned for our own retirement and again, I don't know any who are counting on Social Security. (I'd advise you not to count on it either, privatized or not --- save and invest all you can, and then some more.)

Some more advice. Don't look to Hollywood for history.

Oh, I have got to comment on this as well.

Right now, we live in a world where the price of oil continues to rise, further strangling economic growth, in part because the Boomers refused to accept nuclear power. They feared what they did not understand.

I spent to first 20 years of my career in the nuclear power industry and support it 100%. But please Dr. Einstein, tell the class how building more nuclear plants will do anything to decrease oil demand in this country.

Again, you go off on simplistic rants with little or no knowledge. But then again, you are young, and pretty much clueless.

SImplistic? I doubt it. I hold a degree in history and run a multi-billion dollar data processing complex for a Fortune 100 firm.

I served on two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in my 8 years (full-time and reserve) in the Navy. Both ships had reactors about the size of double-decker bus, and were capable of creating enough electricty to light Chicago for 25 years. There was no need to burn oil, there was no need to deal with greenhouse gasses or noxious fumes. Not much in the way of equipment needed to be lubricated as compared to an older diesel-fired plant.

The Navy, incidentally, has been handling nuclear reactors for five decades now, with an exemplary safety record. Much better than Exxon's or BP's I might add.

As for propaganda, according to Dan and his bunch, the war was a crime against humanity and the United Sates was evil-evil-evil for even being involved. My take: we needed to be there, but we needed to win. The troops on the ground were not allowed to win, and much of it had to do with the situation at home. Any increase in US force or use of force brought the rioters out. You may not know one protester, but I would wager that's more along the lines of soomeone hiding their irresponsibility and stupidity from you. Were it was once fashionable to protest, it is now looked upon a bad form for having been a protester. I doubt very highly that you have never in your life ever made an acquaintance who held anti-Vietnam sympathies.

And please, do not take credit for the Reagan Revolution. The people who voted for Reagan were very much of your parents generation as much as they were yours.

As fo rthe hubub over social security, when the present recipients die, the problem is half solved: most fo the resistance ot reform has come from those raised during the Depression and they have an emotional attachment to FDR and his programs. The other half of the solution will happen when all those born before 1965 realize they shouldn't be so selfish as to believe they should get something for nothing, like their parents did in their later years.

As for simple addition, if you were born in 1946, you would now be 59 years old, and eleigible under certain circumstances for early retirement (under the 75/25 rule), and begin collecting social security within a few years, at least prior to 67. The rest of us would have to retire at 67 before we began to collect anything.

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