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.
We're in full agreement on that. A moral people would have no use for a War on Drugs, because such a people would be responsible for their own actions and not need a nanny state to tell them what to do.
I understand completely. God bless.
Truthfully, I see it as a wash. He was the best available at the time. But compared with Reagan ... hmmmmm...
You're broad brush is out again. I'm 49. I've been a salaried management employee since 1980. I was forced to join the IBEW from 1977 to 1980 so I could care for the electronics on 180 tuna boats that happened to be docked in a union shipyard. My company paid the monthly dues to keep the knuckleheads in the union happy. I was paid 4 times as much as any union hack. The only thing the IBEW ever did for me was vandalize my car to coerce the payment of a $60 initiation fee. That has earned my lifelong enmity for unions.
I agree with you there.
My mother's surrounding neighborhoods mid to late 1940's.
Southern Calif.
Neighbor to the left, 2 parent family- Father major alcoholic returning from India after World Warll- Beat mother beat sons, sons ran way from home one ended up in jail.
Neighbors to the right- 2 parent family. Father habitual gambler lost all the money at the race track, mother made money by scrubbing the floor at the USO, my family gave them food.
Neighbors across the street. Father molesting his teenage daughter, mother could do nothing she became a drunk.
Yes All families were doing so well prior to Baby Boomers.
Indeed, there is no detente, no compromise and no truce. There is either total victory or one or another form of defeat.
Good research but I do not believe the statistics on illegal abortions because many were done in Mexico and other foreign countries.
You are made of solid stuff. God Bless You.
If you study the history of the WoD you will find that it started because Hearst wanted to eliminate the hemp competition to his timber-based paper-making business. As to why it continues, it's good business for some.
They without social programs often worked the problems out rather than split and also adding massive poverty and extra dysfunction to the mix. There was a great depression and war that probably did create a lot of problems for all back in the 30s/40s. The women did not in court get to make lawyers rich and to break up the family that easily, so many had to work it out. You do notice we had lots of older and still originally married couples in the past compared to what's happening today, so something changed that wasn't that good for families.
Ummm... Talked to CompSciGuy off line. We have him wrong on this.
Thanks. :-)
Sorry I got so steamed on the thread. :-(
So you are saying that all the women that endured a Hit a slap a beating from there husbands should have just worked it out????
I had one relationship in my life (the one and only time) where I endurded Physical Abuse, he should be glad I had him thrown in jail at that time otherwise my dad and brothers would of killed him...
Let's pick this one up on a more appropriate thread.
None whatsoever. I paid into SS, my parents paid into SS, my grandparents paid into SS. So now it's your turn, bud. That's the way it works.
Your ignorance of history is amazing, but it is an understandable consequence of being educated in schools that were dumbed down to make minorities "feel good". The socialist teacher's unions and leftists in government pressed for poor schools. You are a product of their efforts.
The Vietnam war was never run by the military. It was run by America hating leftist Democrats who dictated the actions of the military from their political offices. Robert S. Macnamara plowed the jungles of Viet Nam with endless waves of B-52 carpet bombing to wipe out the stocks of bombs. The weapons were NEVER turned on Hanoi or any targets in North Viet Nam. It was a total sham. Losing the war was not the fault of the military or the men who were DRAFTED to serve in that war. I grew up thinking it was normal to have the TV news reports tallying the number of US military men killed EACH day. We were continuously at war until I graduated from high school in 1973. I never had any say at the ballot box until the first election in November 1974 when I was old enough to vote. I also had a 1A draft card in my possession at that time. The draft lottery was held the next year and my birth date was number 319.
There are still slimeballs like Ramsey Clark and Hanoi Jane Fonda and others of their ilk spewing anti-American trash to this day.
BTW, my father fought in Korea and Vietnam. He even tried to fight in WWII, but he was caught at the Canadian border at age 14 trying to sneak into the Canadian armed forces because he was too young to be accepted by the US. My dad was out at sea for more that 50% of my lifetime between birth and age 13.
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