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.
Only problem is that you didn't pay as much as we will pay. I can't remember the numbers but something like six or seven of you guys paided into the system for every retired person.
On the other hand the workers in a few years will on be one or two paying for the retired person.
Codswallop. Unions were around long before my generation. BTW, I have never belonged to a union.
You citation, please for this fact you present for overwhelming support for euthanasia among boomers.
Thanks in advance for your thoroughness
haha.....my dad did same.....without shoes.......
Yes, an 8 hour day in a union shop, which includes an hour for lunch and two 15 minute coffee breaks.
Yeah, 6.5 hours a day of work. Real tough.
It wasn't at the time, I don't live in the Woulda, Shoulda Coulda, state of mind.
I did what I did because at the time it was *right* for me..
If I lived with regrets, I could not grow as a human being..
Bingo.
Another worthwhile take on demographics can be found in the most recent Steyn column. Though it focuses on France and Europe, there are some lessons for the U.S.:
Mark Steyn: It’s the demography, stupid
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1519371/posts
My arms would fall off if I tried to do what a steel-worker does. But that steel worker's head would explode if he tried to do what I do (I'm a computer scientist with a PhD in Math). Have you ever concentrated so hard on a problem that you developed a migraine from sheer mental effort? How dare you suggest that what we do isn't work???
And what about those baby boomers that served in the military?....for my hubby, his days began at 6am, and lasted until 5pm...and what about when in the field, and on duty 24hrs a day...and what about CQ duty, being on alert, and all the other times that an 8 or 10 hr day would be a luxury...my husband put in long, long days while in the military, but he never whined about it...it was just a fact of life, when one is in the military...
And once out of the military, and working at the post office, my husband put in 11 hour days, every single day, and worked every other weekend...he was used to working hard, and long hours in the military, so doing the same for the post office was a snap(tho with the post office he received overtime pay, which was never the case with the military)...
All this whining, and pointing of fingers, about how this generation is bad, or that generation is good, is nothing but generalizations, which again, I will say is stupid...there are good and bad individuals in every single generation...
Sorry but I am of the WWII generation and have NO IDEA what they do other than play nintendo like my Grandchildren.
Um, you just said that the way to grow as a human being is to avoid accumulating any experience whatsoever. Wow. We're definitely conversing between planets here.
:-)
You are a breath of fresh air on this thread.
Cheers,
CSG
Oh but it's really tough sitting on your duff just like I am doing right now on this computer typing on FR while ALSO doing my own work I get paid for, GEEZ I could do this all night without breaking a sweat. THANK GOD I can excercise early mornings and later evenings so I can give my heart a good jolt of activity.
While I generally and philosophically agree, my take based on no more than overflights on the way east-west or vice-versa, is that there is one *whole* lot of nothing in the American West.
Spoken like someone who has no clue.
Cheers,
CSG
You sound like me. That's my plan when our kids are grown. Nothing cheese me more than to hear people complaining about their parents spending "our inheritance". I already told my children we can help them a little when they go to college, but since there are five of them they have the choice of working their way through college and having us take care of ourselves or we can pay for college and then we can move in with them so they can take care of us, since we'll be broke. My children liked the first idea better.
I gave up a career to stay home and raise my children. I am now watching my grandchildren in order to help out my son and his wife. We have paid for college, for a business start-up, for extra medical and dental bills.
In the effort to keep our children in the schools where they had friends, we had to change careers and nearly lost our house (which is why our debt load is so high...we are paying off debts occurred during the lean years).
There are millions of couples like me. I can't help it that there are a lot of jerks in my generation, but I can point to my children's generation and show an equal number of selfish jerks.
If you ask me, the inter-generational "warfare" is pushed by the left, who would like nothing better than to have families torn asunder. It makes their job easier.
You don't know what the heck I have done or not done. I paid, I reap. Get over it. I also paid for your education as well.
BTW, if this is the attitude of your generation, I am bloody glad I never had any children.
And to think I busted my a$$ day and night to keep you free. Go figure.
The way *I* you seem to forget I am one of those Boomers who are into *I* and I am not dis-counting what you do for a living at all, but it's far from the sweat that many men had to do to take care of a wife and 7 children with little education....
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