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.
You've got that right - Thanks for the laugh.
"Per capita, the hardest working generation in America's history, based on average hours worked."
Well, they better start looking for third jobs because some retirees have boat payments to make.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statitistics, just 17.0% of all workers aged 45 to 54 years belonged to a union in 2004. That was down from 17.6% in 2003.
I was forced to join a union once. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I resolved never again to work for a company that has a strong union.
I would say it's the fault of those who were old enough to vote before Jan 22, 1973 (The date Rowe v. Wade was decided).
In your dreams only.
OOOOOOOOOkkkkkkk. Can you name some of them?
In 2008 we would be better off just skipping the whole baby boom generation and pick a Matt Blunt / Paul Ryan ticket.
Compare Matt Blunt's Record with any other Baby Boomer Republicans in power
ROTFLMAO! You actually made me bust out laughing. Do you really think I will get back what I pay in? OMG, too funny.
I'm in your generation and you are lying to yourself if you think that more than 25% of boomers have your or my work ethic.
Most of them are lazy liberals, RINO's or apolitical. Only the rich lib's among that type (inheritied daddy's money, most likely) will be close to self sufficient in retirement.
Those of us who earned our money and will be self sufficient are very far and few between.
I know that I will never see a company pension or social security. My whole retirement is based on three things:
My 401k
My house paid for
Personnel Investments
& I plan to retire in comfort.
I love my children and they love me. I do not expect them to support us, although I am sure they would help us if something terrible happened, just like my sisters and I did when my parents both became ill at the same time.
I think there is some Soros money being spread around to foment this type of dissension...so that euthanasia and other social "rememdies" can be promoted.
Spoken like a true socialist.
Whereas we miserable slobs can fix our own computers.
And program our own DVD players.
That's your response? Don't you remember the huge protest about her death? It was the young that seemed, to me, to be indifferent to her plight.
When someone on this board asks for a citation for an asserted fact, the expected response is a link to a study or some other verifiable source for the assertion.
See post 167. :-)
I think it already broke out on this thread. Watch out, your in no man's land getting shot by both sides!
By your statement alone someone who is in the know could assume that you really don't have a need to know, nor do you understand what its all about. But if you really want to know, I'll gladly divulge how I am putting my money where my mouth if you'd like to PM me.
Secondly, if you think Defense Contractors just are war profiteers you don't have a clue about what is really going on. I know plenty of DefCons who are out dodging lead mosquitoes in the WoT. Unfortunately, in the world we live in Contractors, and Civilians have to step in to keep the warfighter fighting, like no other time in history. A Vietnam Legacy that's come home to roost.
Cheers,
CSG
Sure, that's my response. I found that among the many I spoke to regarding that situation, baby boomers were uniformly either supportive of or indifferent to Michael Schiavo, and non-boomers were universally aghast (except for one hardcore communist).
Are you the only one who didn't understand that the whole Schiavo controversy was about boomers wanting the power of euthenasia over their own parents?
Yes, but many of them died in obscurity protecting your a$$.
"What is the source of this inter-generational warfare"
What is really confusing is folks like me that depending on whose definition you use, could be either an X-er, or a boomer.
I mean, what am I to do? take myself out to save myself in taxes? Or should I just work extra hard because of the lavish retirement I'm living?
Somebody help me.
Did you actually observe this yourself, or are you relying on the reporting of the MSM?
It wasn't an argument, it was just a tongue-in-cheek response to CodeToad's post about adult childen picking their parents' nursing home.
God bless you, I have more in common with Gen-X than my own.
The boomer generation cut-off should be 1959, not 1965. Then the next Generation should start in 1985.
I know very few Boomers who plan to be self supporting in retirement. Most of them are on the government teat, in one form or another and scream like a liberal when I tell them Social Security should be scrapped.
By the way my wife and I do give our kids a two parent family, and we are VERY anti- baby murder.
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