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.
Their war weariness never went away.
I've got my own companions from my days in a Radio Car and Ground Zero. They come and go.
Also understand Many of the Protestors of the Vietnam Anti War movement was due to the fact, THEY HAD NO IDEA why they were being drafted and sent over there??? Who went Poor Kids, many went because they were patriotic as there fathers before them. These Vets were screwed when they came back by there Government and by American Society..
My folks helped a vet living in a broken down trailer totally disabled from Agent Oarnge,in the mid-80's he was not receiving once ounce of Medical Benefits until my dad fixed that!
Agreed. (With the help of those in power - previous generation). IMHO, Johnson, McNamara, and the like are scum who screwed this country.
I agree. While I had some experience with classic 70s Heavy Metal as a teen, I had no exposure to the true 1960s culture. When punk and new wave arrived, that was what I did. I love 80s music, that is my "nostalgia music." I have far more in common with people 5 years or more younger than me than I do with people 5 or more years older than me. I was born in '62.
Already there.
You are part of the subset of Boomers a late subset known as Generation Jones.
The whiny, ungrateful twerps have NEVER experienced the need to sacrifice a comfortable life. They are terrified at the thought of any responsibility beyond playing video games and watching TV while mom and dad keep the cupboard full of food and do their laundry.
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I am leading edge boomer and I was too young to even vote in the sixties, how the hell did we start the screw up the American family?
40 million abortions between 1973 and 1998.
As for what the stats might have been before Rowe v. Wade, they can only estimate since they weren't keeping track of it.
"It should be pointed out that there has been considerable debate over both the actual number of illegal abortions and the number of women who died as a result of them prior to legalization..It is simply false to claim that there were nearly a million illegal abortions per year prior to legalization. There is no reliable statistical support for this claim.[8] In addition, a highly sophisticated recent study has concluded that "a reasonable estimate for the actual number of criminal abortions per year in the prelegalization era [prior to 1967] would be from a low of 39,000 (1950) to a high of 210,000 (1961) and a mean of 98,000 per year.[9]
8. See John Jefferson Davis, Abortion and the Christian (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1984), p. 75. [up]
9. Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 132-136; Stephen Krason, Abortion: Politics, Morality, and the Constitution (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 301-310. [up]
There's no way in the world you can possibly convince me that boomers fought in Korea. The oldest of them were under 10 years of age at the time. Vietnam, sure - but when you look at the entire generation, those who fought or supported the war were a small minority of the whole. Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan were fought by post-boomers; the youngest boomers were over 40 at the time of the first Gulf War, and over 50 by 2001.
It's funny that you should ask what I have contributed and then mention Clinton - the first baby boomer President. One thing I contributed was to stand up and demand his impeachment, before it was popular to do so. Unfortunately the boomers have outvoted me and my peers time and time again.
They didn't cause the problems but they voted in large enough numbers for Clinton to avoid dealing with them for another 8 years. Need to face such facts.
Proably because *MOM* fianlly got sick of taking a beating from *Dad* and kids were tired of being called derogatory names by a drunk parent so divorces started happening..OBVIOUSLY he thinks the entire neighborhoods were filled with Ward and June Cleavar parents...
Great!
A little background. I was adopted from an overseas orphanage when I was much older than most of children who get adopted. Fortunately my adopted folks ingrained a work ethic to this day I am very greatful for. I can honestly say that not only have I never missed a national vote, I have never once voted for a democrat even in the mid 70s.
(My grandmother was a very close friend of President Richard Nixon)
Also, I just want to be clear that I know not every Baby Boomer was a radical and many did well is raising their families and that many did serve this country and for that I am thankful.
But we all must admit one thing, when history is written, as it has been, the 60's will be remembered for sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll....is that really a good legacy?
And the world really was in B&W until the 'Colorful World of Disney' premiered.
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