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.
You are correct. You are a Millennium Baby. The children of the Lost Geraration (or Gen X). You are the Hero generation and you will make us all proud. Read The Fourth Turning. (You can find it at Amazon.) As a Gen Xer, I was shocked at how well this book defined ME. My parenting. My attitudes and driving forces. I'd be interested to get the perspective of a Millennium Baby on the book's accuracy. (My own kids are too young to get it at this time.)
Go face the election age distribution facts here. The percentage of each age demographic that voted for each Presidential candidate is presented. Your assertion doesn't hold water. It was the senior citizens (60+) that tipped the scale for Clinton in 1992. The split between Democrat, Republican and 3rd party were within 1% in all the other age groups. Boomers only comprise 28% of voters. The other 72% share a majority of the responsibility. Recall that Clinton ran a social security scare campaign to fire up the senior citizen vote.
So your contribution is limited to having an opinion and getting on your soapbox? Very impressive.
I'm sick of your BS. It's you who is historically challenged. When SS was created it had a very low tax rate and served a tiny percentage of the population. It could possibly have been appropriate under those circumstances, but not under the current ones. And under boomer control the facts of the program changed so that those after them would get nothing. This is hardly a secret - it's been known for decades and the boomers have deliberately and definitely decided to do nothing so that they could be the (final) beneficiaries.
John Kerry and Al Gore are examples of privileged children who got special treatment while "serving" in the military. John McCain's father was an admiral. That got him into the Naval Academy in spite of a poor academic record. He went on to flight school and managed to crash 5 airplanes before crashing the 6th one in Vietnam. McCain parlays his military service as cover for his policies that are indistinguiable from Al Gore. Clinton dodged the draft, secretly renounced his citizenship and bad-mouthed the United States on foreign soil. His handlers "fixed" the citizenship problem. The leftist, druggy fruitcakes of the 60s got lots of attention from the press. Many more of that generation received draft notices and served honorably in a sham war conducted by politicians who hated the military.
If I'm that crazy, why are you talking to me?
My experiences walking to school in the snow were limited to 3rd grade in Federal Way, Washington and 5th-7th grade in Springfield, VA. You probably had much deeper snow in NY.
I actually have two H-8 computers. One has the tri-layer Trionyx backplane, Trionyx Z80 CPU/front panel and Trionyx 64k dynamic RAM board. That one is configured with the 4-port serial board and the dual 8" 1.2MB disk drives (smart drives). I still have a working hard sectored floppy controller and the 100K drive to go with it. The other H8 is the stock backplane, 8080 CPU and a static 8K memory card. Not very exciting. The H19 terminal is still ready for service as well. I sold my H9 terminal after wire-wrapping an upgrade to take it from 40X12 upper case only to 80X24 with upper/lowercase ROM. A pair of 2114 static RAM chips provided the extra screen memory.
I still keep HDOS 2.0 and CP/M 2.2 bootable images around. The UCSD Pascal is in a box somewhere.
It was quite a jolt when I put on a flight suit, helmet and steel-toed boots and stepped into the 12-foot deep end of the swimming pool. That was the first time I had been swimming in 20 years. I had to swim 15 yards underwater with all that gear to qualify for position. For extra measure, the trainers put a bar on the bottom of the shallow end and push you down and buckle a seat belt. You have to remove the seat belt, go hand over hand 15 feet to a simulated hatch, operate 5 different latch mechanisms, then "escape" through the hatch to the surface. The first time you get to see what you are doing. The second time them put opaque swim goggles on and repeat the test to make sure you can do it in total darkness.
Thankfully I wasn't doing the helicopter training. There was a lady in my class who will be serving on Marine One with President Bush. She had to deal with the helo simulator. You have to wait for a helicopter to hit the water, flip upside down and fill with water before you can safely try to get out. Even so, the others escaping may end up giving you good kick in the head on the way out.
The parachute training was pretty superficial. I really hope I never have to actually bail out. If there is no alternative, it beats the heck out going down with the bird.
BTW my oldest son turned 34 last week, and he's as conservative as I am. My other two are a bit more towards center, but AFAIK, I didn't raise any lefties.
Keep fighting the good fight; I may not even have to draw on SS. We have a few bucks stashed. Quite a few.
too good...hawhawhaw
Social security was created at a time when people died at 65. For the most part, men died at 60 and women died at 65. The social security approach was envisioned to care for a widow for a nominal period of 5 years. The number of contributors vs beneficiaries was 23 to 1.
Better nutrition and improved medicine changed the rules. People are living into their 80s. That alone is enough to cause the Ponzi scheme to fail. But that wasn't the end. The politicians decided to expand coverage to disable people who never contributed a dime. Next it was children of veterans. Today we are handing out benefits to illegal immigrants. Much of this occurred well before any boomers had access to political office. Politicians of every stripe are always running out of other people's money to do good deeds (to purchase more votes).
The failure of social security is hardly a baby boomer conspiracy. It is another example of the failure of socialism. We just have the misfortune of having to experience it in real time and work to pay for it. It was a mistake from the beginning.
My grandfather routinely purchased groceries for poor people at his church. He did that until the institution of the federal income tax. At that point he proclaimed that the government has decided to take his money and perform those acts of 'charity'. That was the perspective of a man born in 1887 who lived long enough to see man land on the moon.
And I'll bet you had REAL LIVE parents, as well. I'll bet you mothers actually taught you some life skills. I'll bet the vast majority of you had REAL LIVE siblings.
We were the Latch Key Kids. We were the first generation who's mother legally had the right to kill. We were the fatherless generation.
Heck, we needed that darn TV. It was our only role model. Our parents were too busy swapping partners and "having it all" to be bothered with the messy task of actually raising us brats.
Oh, and I thank the Boomers for effectively castrating many of my generation's men so now it's harder than ever to actually find an Xer male who's more than an glorified adolescent.
And with all that said, I still do not (and will never) support euthanasia.
Like I said, you aren't going to see and end to SS, you won't see oldsters thrown into the street to die despite your LOVE of the constitution. Instead you will see a collection of the debt from the people alive and dying today who all made it.
LOL, snow, ice and gangs of New York.
You are correct. And I keep reminding myself of that fact every time I see an AARP advertisement.
But it's hard to maintain the "Stiff Upper Lip" when you come from a broken home and when you see the same, tired story repeating itself over and over again with every one else you know of a similar age.
I have a friend who's divorced mother calls on her cell while were visiting to ask advice on relationships and men. This gives me pause more than anything when it comes to the "Blame Game". My own mother is completely in the dark. Were you guys honestly raised so screwy that so many of you really don't know how to manage life? (Yes, I know that there are many good Boomers out there, but I'm talking significant numbers, here.)Did you guys (Boomers, not you in particular) screw up marriage and family so horribly because you (Boomers, not you in particular) really weren't taught better?
As p*ss*d as I am with Boomers, I have to ask myself if they are the primary target just because they got more press. Perhaps they were cheated as well.
But which generation actually *did* it? Which generation is actually missing a few tens of millions? Could it have been *our* parents who ripped so many of our coworkers out of their guts, then went to great pains to teach us why it was OK? To devalue life?
Every one of my pro-choice teachers was a Boomer. Every single one.
I am trying... I mean I am *really* trying to believe this. But there are at least three posters on this very thread who echo the Democrat's party line as far as SS goes. Your generation had 40 workers for every 1 retiree. We will have 3. That's right. It will take three of us Gen X and Gen Y workers to support every one of you.
There are three posters on this very thread that are telling us to shut up, suck it up, watch them burn through our money until they die and get over it. Yet the numbers tell me that, not only will *I* have to bear the brunt of the burden of the Boomer's final days, but so will my children. This will especially effect them when they are in their financially vulnerable 20's and early 30's, raising their own small children. So what's going to happen? The economy supporting the retired Boomers is not only going to crush my generation, but my children's as well. What the heck kind of society will *my* grandchildren be raised in?
The big picture scares me. When I find three so-called "Conservative" posters who happily ignore the math and flip their own children and grandchildren the bird while doing so, it does tend to make me hate an entire generation. How can we, as a generation, respect our elders when our elders are so callus about their own grandchildren's future? These are *our* babies' lives we're talking about. My daughter. My son. And yet I get to read how some Boomers plan on going RVing and having fun and enjoying their retirement. Too bad they don't love their own children and grandchildren enough to want the same thing for them.
Then that thought pattern leads me to another. I look at my peers and see waaaaaay more raised in divorced, fatherless households than not. The idea of staying with someone you didn't love, of sacrificing for your children, was lost on the vast majority of your generation. So many of you really set us up for failure is a thousand ways. But it was about *me*. *My* happiness. *My* fulfillment. It wasn't about the kids. It was about the now. I see a seriously horrible pattern here of Boomers behaving in a selfish way in my own personal experience. Now our parents are killing our (and our children's) financial future as well as leaving us with the social mess with which they participated.
Lord, I want to have faith that it was just a noisy minority of Boomers that created the problems, not the group. But individuals keep popping their heads up and forcing me to see that it really is more prevalent than I care to admit.
40 Boomers supported one retiree. 3 Gen Xers will support one Boomer butt.
Let me put it this way. If you have 40 strong, healthy adults in a room and you have some guy jump off the stage, into the crowd, the crowd could pass a 200 pound man around like a rag-doll. Nobody would even break a sweat. Now have the same 200 pound man jump into a group of three people. If they didn't just step back ( out of a sense of self-preservation) and let him "splat", if they even tried to carry him to the other side of the room, they would be quite stressed by the burden.
This is what the Boomers are giving us. They cannot understand because they didn't have the same math to deal with.
My husband is a soldier with 18 years in the army. His day begins at 4:30 AM and usually ends around 7PM. He works 6-7 days a week. Tonight he got home at 12AM.
Why are his hours so long? Because of Clinton's downsizing. It's been this way since the mid 90's. 4:30 to 7 or 8PM. This doesn't include the field problems, schools, TDY posts, and combat. That's the norm for our family and for every military family that we know. It's a hard life, but it's all we adjust.
This does not devalue your husband's service to our country. I'm just saying that us lazy Gen Xers really do live in a different world than the Boomer's remember.
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