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.
They were drafted into the war to defend liberty and freedom from the Communists. Then they were betrayed by the domestic Left whose loyalties laid with the enemy. Feel free to pass on the message... but I would guess they know already.
Why this country decided to afterwards put some of those same enemies (Clinton, Kerry, etc.) into high office is a question I cannot answer.
I know lots of vets from that war and many were more perturbed that there was seemingly no will to win it.
What were they suppose to win? Saigon fell this is a country determined by thousand of years of history and culture to live a certain way, so what were we going to win?
They were drafted into the war to defend liberty and freedom from the Communists. WHICH WAS THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL...
What reason would you give?
Wipe away those tears, pull your britches up, get a education, a job and stop whining about how unfair life is.
If only I had been a paris hilton.
I beleive it was to Show the Soviets as well as China a intimidating effect by our attempts to stop Communisim from spreading through out All of Asia.
They thought if they could stop Communism from spreading in Vietnam LAOS AND CAMBODIA WILL FALL which was dead wrong, weapons used by the VC came from the Soviet Union it was a war we had no business in and like someone said lost 50,000 male Bay Boomers for no darn good reason.
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You are just wrong. The anti-war movement was at its peak 1968-71. It was founded by the SDS and their ilk...red-diaper babies, not a single boomer in the bunch. The oldest boomers were in their early twenties and not running the media (any form) or even significantly represented. I'd like you to name a few of these powerful media boomers from 1968....No don't bother. There were none. And, sorry, but your wishing things so does not make them so.
You really do not know what you're talking about. Have a good night.
Is it true the Federal government balance sheet values land holding at historical cost? I thought I heard about this once and how the Fed is sandbagging the numbers. We are not in the dire straits people make it out to be. The land which is held in reserve can be sold for a helluva gain for your Uncle. It's valued in the trillions using present dollars. The cost is peanuts. Take the Gadsden and Alaskan purchases for example.
Partially, and we did that for the most part though Laos and Cambodia were lost and remain. But, like South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia were given time to understand freedom and grow markets.
You can think of Vietnam as the substitue war between the US and the USSR without the nukes. From my point of view, a necessary war.
I'm doing just fine, thank you, though most of my peers are not. And frankly, that's a damn poor excuse for theft.
I don't doubt there were some non-American Americans going back to McCarthy.
Why necessary? Saigon fell anyways, so what was the accomplishment?
I'm wrapping up 10 consecutive weeks of 70 hours/week working on a software project. On Monday morning I'm donning a flight suit and spending 18 hours in the air with the fruits of my labor. Fortunately, the aviation survival training that was prerequisite for sitting on my duff has prepared me in case I have to bail out with a parachute into the ocean or don a smoke mask with a demand pressure regulator to deal with a sudden loss of cabin pressure. This trip is a bit safer than riding the NATO bus through Izmir, Turkey with armed guards on the front and back. They is just something exhilarating about 9mm submachine guns and terrorists that want to spice up your day.
To me it was a war of ideolgy and that was the BIG DIVIDE.
If it had been a voluntary war it would of been one thing, but young men fresh out of High school FORCED by there draft cards to fight in a war of ideology?
Well it definetly sounds like you will be giving your heart a good jolt!
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LBJ and McNamara were Lefties? Where do you kids get this BS?
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