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.
I have been paying for years. I bet I wont see a dime of it either. Why I am saving for my own future. I figure I am paying for the generation that is using it now. I do not begrudge them that.
Based on what facts...My Aunt had 27 illegal abortions in 1967.
You are the minority of your generation. Most of your fellows proteststed the Vietnam War and campaigned insanely for a "Sane Freeze." Deny it though you may, the Worst Generation moved the US to the Left further in 20 years than it had moved in the previous 150.
It would be nice to have you on board with those of us trying to end this injustice.
Demographics and the immense wealth already stolen from post-boomers allow you that luxury. Those very same factors also make it financially impossible for those that follow the boomers to do the same.
Born in 1924? Wow! Nine years older than my dad would have been. You're a fellow I would love to interview. I like to collect stories from the older generations. It's a hobby I have wanted to do, but have only recently started on. Last week I was elated when I was asked by my church to interview a lady in my church. My children went with me and my 11 year old son asked who else we could interview. It was a great experience for him.
Heh you blame them for accepting illegal drugs and I blame them for using the WoD to create a police state for their children. There's no winning for them even if you and I will never agree which is right.
As bad as it is to be a Gen X-er supporting the insufferably self-centered Boomers, it is better for us to do it, that have to import 30 million Muslims to America to support Social Security (as they did in France with a similar number, as % of pop)
There is much confusion among the faction of Boomers who went against the hippie grain. Certainly, fighting in Vietnam or sitting in a missile silo is commendable. However, those who did not negated much of the good done by the patriotic minority. Indeed, as noted, Clinton was the first Boomer president and embodied the worst of the Worst Generation. Also, I might add, some of those here who did their duty back in the 60s and 70s still voted Democrat and socially were liberal.
LoL.....
LOL...you folks who think you are "collecting your own money back" when you get SS, Medicare and now government provided prescription drugs are truly ignorant. Any money you paid in to SS was immediately sent out to those receiving payments that month. NOTHING was put away with your name on it. Furthermore, the SCOTUS has ruled that the federal government has NO obligation to pay you anything since SS, in the eyes of the law, is strictly a tax program, not a benefits program. And THIS monstrosity is what Democrats fight to preserve because it gives them the power to buy the votes of gullible old people. I say let it go totally broke and let us never resurrect it.
But the rising Boomers and their student revolution were certainly factors pushing the unreal wave of leftward movement in politics from the late 60s onward. I mean, come on, do you think that the pro abortion crowd and feminazis would have had influence if not for the radicalism of the 1960s? Get real.
Oops! *red faced* Wish we could delete stupid replies. I was reading and listening to my kids at the same time, so misread your post before replying to it. I will duck and hide a little bit. Oops! LOL!
You're bloviating. Provide the citation or the link to the scholarly study that supports your, in my opinion, unwarranted assertion that boomers support euthanasia to a greater degree than the general population.
I guess W is the second boomer president. OTOH, I'm not yet sure whether that's a good recommendation for us or not.
We're at work all the time. We don't have time to protest.
I agree with you completely. My stepdad was the guy who voted for him. I was shocked! Even more so when my mom said she preferred him. Thankfully, she did not vote.
Your ignorance is showing...again. Boomers fought in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. Where did you serve? My service has come as a DoD contractor on classified tasks in foreign countries as well as endless work to make the tools used by our military to protect YOU. What have you contributed?
The craven greed was exhibited in the 1990's during the Clinton years. Just about the time you became an adult. You were a participant during those years as well.
Arnie, smoking a joint in "Pumping Iron" ;)
And unfortunately some of them are still at the top of the food chain in the military-industrial complex, making the same mistakes again and again. There is no diplomatic solution to the current WoT, there can be no detente, (More or less my beef those guys in a nutshell).
Cheers,
CSG
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