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.
So what went wrong? What made so many Boomers get into drugs, free love, anti War treason, and anti authoritarian notions so extreme that many people became unmanageable?
That reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you’d say.
"Now where were we? Oh yeah -- the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..."
Since you claim to be highly educated, I'll give it to you straight.
When you were forced to pay, you were robbed. That was wrong.
By forcing me to pay, you are robbing me. That too is wrong.
Your justification for robbing me is that you were robbed, and therefore I ought to be robbed.
That reasoning is morally bankrupt. It is also precisely what socialism is.
You arrived a little to late to observe the economy of the Great Society. Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Democrats crafted a program that encouraged unwed black women to have 3 or 4 children before age 18 to be ensured of sufficient government welfare checks to subsist without any gainful employment. It was necessary to exclude the father of these children to obtain the benefits. That program was a roaring success from 1964 to 1972. Shortly thereafter, the Roe vs Wade decision made abortion easy. Welfare policies were changed to discourage popping out excessive offspring to qualify to subsist on the dole. The abortion mills kill almost 1200 black babies every single day. While the policies weren't exclusively crafted around the black population, they were the ones who most visibly manifested the consequences of the Democrat social policies.
You are to much, do you REALLY think if 40 million babies were not aborted, I assume LEGALLY, they would be born???
DO you actually have a number of babies terminated by illegal abortions?
Since the boomers have forced us to make the choice, I will be first on line to pull the plug on them so that our children can prosper. If they hadn't stolen so much money from us, perhaps we'd have the resources to do both. Oh well, sucks to be them (about as much as it sucks to be one of the folks they stole from).
Who voted for Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, in the main. Which generation favored these two, in the main?
I have no idea what you are driving at here.
Oh. You gave me the distinct impression you were planning to collect SS checks, with full knowledge that it consists of funds forcibly taken from me.
I am collecting my own money back. How hard is that to understand?
I believe I'll take that bet. Unless a radio astronomer makes well over a quarter million a year, my income exceeds your tax bill.
Probably so. However, I pay more tax that you may think.
Apparently, you lost. You returned to the land of the free thinking that my private property was rightfully yours, and calling me a whiner when I object.
Huh? Where did I ever talk about private property? You are clueless arn't you.
If you tried that angle back in 1780, you'd have been tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
You actually made me laugh out loud.
Thank you. I spent too many words trying to say that, and failed.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Boomers, especially the *core* Boomers, born 1945 - 1957, are very different from you and your husband. Less than 1/3 have retirement funds.
At least it came back today in full force. Thanks for caring.
The vast majority of them would have been born. No doubt about it.
For your information, those that follow you will get nothing at all. Not "less". Not "far less". Nothing. Why should I be paying for Social Security when even the most wild-eyed statist can't claim I will ever see a dime back from it?
The problem with what you tell me about Al Gore is you must have had no sense of what he has done and how his words are just said for election purposes.
If you have any conservative leanings, you should have a curious desire to investigate and to verify what is truth.
Would it be news to you regarding Al Gore if I told you he was instrumental in passing secret rocket and missile guidance intelligence to China?
The company he let do this was charged with a crime and paid heavy fines. Being VP, he and Bill were allowed a pass on this whole issue. Before China could never reach even Alaska before with nuclear missiles, after Al Gore all of even Arizona can now be lit up with nukes thanks to Bill and Al.
Under that circumstances, you really would have trusted Al to ever do anything for real about SS?
He probably would have surrendered to Bin Laden after 9-11.
If you have followed any of his post election speeches, he sounds mentally unstable and would fit right in with Art Bell as a conspiracy guest on Coast to Coast.
The Cold War was largely fought by the WW2 generation and the Silent Generation. Certainly, Boomers served as troops, from the mid 1960s until the late 80s. But in truth, the policies of Clinton were the true Boomer policies. Clinton's first term was symbolic of power passing into the hands of the Boomers.
Ok fine. I cannot fix it, I did not vote for it, I am stuck in it, and I have to live with it. Life sucks then you die.
I respectfully disagree. Carter laid the foundation.
Drugs have always been around, Cocaine was very popular in the 20's and the early 1900's as well as Heroin... I assume you are talking of the Hippie Anti-Establishment movement, they were young rebelled agaisnt the hypocritical puritanical views of there parents. Dad could drink a 5th of Bourboun but smoking Pot was of the devil.
I guess the sexual revolution was based upon the fact that many women were not allowed to be sexual,they did not think sex was for enjoyment, rather than a function used to please the man and to produce babies.
Vietnam? what was that war for anyways?
Baby Boomers did not get us into that mess.
All of this has been taken to the extreme, but it was an era of rebellion.
IMO the boomers were the troubled parents that started the breakdown of the family.
They wanted to be friends with their kids and not parents as much as they needed to.
They often gave some acceptance to illegal drugs and often don't have their kids prepared to learn when they are dropped of at class.
The screw up of the American families began in the 60s and continue to this day IMO.
The progressive tax system aka screw the rich is a scheme doomed to failure. The number of truly rich people is small and dwindling. The lower and middle classes pay almost no taxes, yet they are the ones sucking up all the benefits of the socialist government programs. As the boomers retire, the enormous flow of tax money that they contribute is going to dry up. There won't be any 'rich' or middle classes to 'screw' with taxation. The demand for benefits will far outstrip the supply of funds. The only alternative will be severe cutbacks or completely ending the socialist entitlement programs.
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