Posted on 11/10/2005 1:22:46 PM PST by qam1
America should prepare for a big fat war between the generations. It’s going to be ugly.
On one side is the baby boom generation, which retires and claims a ton of government benefits. On the other are younger workers, forced to fund those benefits plus pay the bills their elders left them.
When the war comes, the Federal Reserve chairman will have to be a general. That person will likely be Bush nominee Ben Bernanke. The question is, for which side will he fight?
Outgoing Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan tried to represent both sides. He supported the Bush tax cuts.
This gave comfort to today’s taxpayers, who chose not to charge themselves for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the new Medicare drug benefit and the quarter-billion-dollar bridge to nowhere.
Last spring, Greenspan did service for the other side. “I fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver,” he said.
One solution would be to ramp-up means-testing for Medicare, the health insurance plan for the elderly. Greenspan would reconfigure the program “to be relatively generous to the poor and stingy to the rich.”
The political reality is that the baby boom generation expects to see the nice government handouts its retired parents enjoyed, and then some. Younger workers expect to be taxed at today’s lower rates. One group will be very disappointed — or perhaps both groups — because there is no way the Candyland economics of today can go on.
The whole alarming future is nicely mapped out in a book, “The Coming Generational Storm,” by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, a personal-finance columnist at The Dallas Morning News.
Kotlikoff and Burns clearly sympathize with younger Americans and Americans not yet born, who will be paying both our bills and their own. “Does it feel better,” the authors write, “if those unknown victims of our rapacity are someone else’s children and the children of those children and the children of those children of those children?”
Sounds like war to me. Kotlikoff and Burns try to be meticulously nonpartisan, but I won’t. Though the irresponsible policymaking spanned decades, today’s mad deficits rush us closer to disaster. Democrats are not shy about pushing for retiree benefits, but at least they consider raising taxes to pay for them. Not the current crowd, whose spend-and-borrow strategy is the 1919 Versailles Treaty of this-century America: an unstable setup that guarantees future conflict.
The scam is that the tax cuts are not really wiping the nation’s slate clean of tax obligations. When spending exceeds tax revenues, the difference must be borrowed. That debt does not disappear. It gets paid for, with interest, by someone’s taxes. So the Bush cuts simply move the taxes from one generation of shoulders to another.
Bernanke would certainly come to the Fed job with good credentials. Head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, he formerly chaired the Princeton economics department. Bernanke seems OK, but other candidates were more upfront about deficits.
One was Martin Feldstein, President Ronald Reagan’s top economic adviser. Feldstein drew flak for criticizing the Reagan deficits. The Bush White House wouldn’t want to hear that kind of thing. Anyway, there’s no need to worry about making ends meet when you can use the next generation’s credit card.
Another Republican contender for the Fed job was Larry Lindsey. He was fired as a Bush adviser in 2002, after predicting that the war in Iraq would cost up to $200 billion, a figure already passed. Lindsey did not understand: One simply does not talk price in the Bush administration.
Given the president’s tendency to give top jobs to those closest, we can give thanks that he did not nominate his banker brother. Neil Bush played a major role in the Silverado Savings & Loan fiasco of the 1980s, which cost taxpayers $1 billion.
Or perhaps the president was doing the big-brotherly thing in protecting Neil from a job sure to be filled with strife.
The person who heads the Fed in the next decade will be trying to steer the nation through the perfect economic storm. Good luck to the new chairman, and to all the generations.
Pardon me, but you just finished explaining that women were trapped in marriage and then dumped for younger models, and that you'd never let some [man] do that to you. As if that were the typical married experience in the 50's. And now you claim that you have no anti-male angst. Doesn't sound particularly credible.
As for the "sexual libertinism" part, that was my translation of your "date who *I* wanted..." I challenge you to dispute my translation.
I also had a child out of wedlock...
...whoops, too late. I guess I did read you right.
when the person I was with demanded I have an abortion, but I didn't and supported my child without welfare or child support. This is a feminist?
Absolutely. Anti-male angst (of which you've shown plenty), avoidance of marriage, and sexual libertinism are the heart and soul of feminism.
Thanks to you both for your kind comments...
Sometime next year, me and the hubby are going to close up the house, jump into the RV, and just drive until we drop dead...we do plan to return home to our house, from time to time to rest, but we do plan to spend most of our time in the Rv, seeing the USA, and we also plan to visit every microbrewery and brewpub that we can find(we live in the Pacific Northwest, so it may take some time, before we sample all of them in Washington, Oregon and California)...
Beer tasting our way across America, seeing the sights and hearing the sounds and meeting the people in America, and all done at our own speed and in our own leisure time, is what we plan...
My son says, "have a grand time", spend all your money, I want you two to die penniless"...You see, we raised him well enough to provide for himself, and he believes it would be horrible for us to die, with a big bank account to pass along to him...he wants nothing to do with it...
Life is grand...
i hear you brother, my mother just bought a house on one of those interest only variable loan. my grandfather paid for his first home in cash. and his second, and his third and last.
did all that brown acid fry their brains, they sure can't do basic math.
parents just don't understand.
Right. Try it sometimes.
The little secret that most older Americans don't want to admit is that they really didn't work all that hard in the "good old days." Americans work 20% more hours these days than they did in 1970.
Hey pup....you're full of $hit....if you follow in my footsteps you will be one tired boy.....BTW...I can now lay on my a$$...because I worked when I was young....
These whiny ungrateful twerps are out in the deserts of Iraq, and the mountains of Afganistan dying for the mistakes of your generation's first president. I don't see too many Boomers out there in the bush with us Gen X'ers. But I certainly see alot of you riding desks happy to have us do your dirty work. Spare me the "We won the Cold War" attitude, most of the people that did that are worm food now. Your challenge was always Islamofacism, and you settled for peace and prosperity. 1979? Osama Bin Laden? The Kobar Towers? USS Cole? Ring any bells? Don't get on your high horse, it just hurts more when you get knocked off.
Cheers,
CSG
So can I.
In fact my very first computer was an S-100 computer that had a hand wire-wrapped backplane with each chip individually soldered into their respective daughter boards that I had to custom interface to a surplus teletype. When you say you fix your own computer, does that mean you only pull and plug boards? Fix to me is using a logic probe to find the bad IC and replace it. Anything else is just pop and swap IMHO.
Again if that is what you would like to call it..As I staed I did my own thing not because I was Political that is for darn sure because I wanted to have FUN plain and simple. I put myself through school and did what I did and had alot of fun at times doing what I did.
I never said I was a little goody 2 shoe chickie, I was a wild child that learned alot on the road to Adulthood and maturity.
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The SCOTUS "approved" abortion years before the vast majority of boomers had the right to vote. The seven consenting justices were all over fifty and were all appointed to the court by Presidents who were elected without a single boomer vote.
Why would you post in a way that so blatantly displays your ignorance of the facts of your own history?
Thats my SS not yours. I paid into it. I get it back. Pretty simple huh?
You can refuse to admit it all you want, but previous generations didn't work all that hard. Working 9-5 was standard. Nobody, except government bureaucrats, work such easy hours anymore.
In a word, yes. I'm married to a Philippine national and have checked into it.
I will need special dispensations but it can be done.
And even if I don't, I can always hit the black market once I'm there.
We've all made mistakes. What I'm not getting from you is any sort of hint that you actually consider your past behavior a mistake.
The media or those who are the most outspoken seem to be at fault for this so-called "war". The boomers who shout the loudest, "me, me, me" (think Bill Clinton) are the ones we notice the most. Just like the Generation X-ers everyone hears about are the idiots on MTV. Sometimes I see people my age and think, "I feel so old."
And the cold war. I missed Vietnam by one year.
Oh Common, people who worked in Factory's, Plants, Automotive Paper Mills etc, that are not sitting on there ARSE like Computer people, you dare to compare???
That's not how it works. SS doesn't "belong" to anyone. The government could stop paying it tomorrow, and there would be nothing illegal about it if they did.
do tell......have you reached that maturity yet laney?????
No, you didn't. You paid into the general fund, and some con-men spent it. Now you want to get even by defrauding your children. If you weren't a socialist, you might try something like putting a stop to the thievery, so that you children would have enough to support you voluntarily. If you haven't already alienated them with your parasitic attitude, that is.
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