Generational war is brewing

Tracey Press ^ | 11/10/05 | Froma Harrop

[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.

[Marie]

But what worries and angers some in the later generations is that when the Baby Boomers retire, there will only be 1-2 people paying into SS for each person taking out of it. So either SS goes under, or tax rates increase astronomically. No matter what happens, many in my generation have figured out we will not be able retire. At best we can expect to work till we die or have one of our kids take us in when we are unable to work. But the safety net promised by so many politicians is going to be gone, and I have a bad feeling of what will happen to the stock market once millions of people begin to cash out their 401(k)s.

Well said.

[familyop]

"I guess you mean you, because I didn't."

You jumped to a conclusion on an assumption and wrote something personal. Do you believe that "the personal is political?" The divorce rate problem in our generation is common knowledge.

In the following, you'll see as to why socialists have been pushing feminist policies into our government, and why it is dangerous for our Republican Party to pander to feminism. More singles vote Democrat than do marrieds, and more women vote Democrat than do men.

"Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society" (Frederick Engels, "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State").

Mao's Little Red Book on Women
http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Mao/Mao-31-Women.html

Some of Lenin's words on women
http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm

The following is from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Fredrick Engels)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

"The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women."

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial."

“Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included)” (Karl Marx Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, MECW, Volume 43, p. 184, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_12_12.htm)

Feminists (both men and women favoring romanticism, because they want to fool around) spawned quite a number of social programs that we don't need and aren't working.

[Marie]

You have my full support for this, I to am willing to consider all my SS payments a sunk cost if I could be exempted from the system.

Ditto. Most of us have already given up on ever seeing a dime of that money.

[Marie]

Thanks! I stole it from another FReeper months ago. Can't remember who or I'd give them credit.

[stainlessbanner]

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[Marie]

You get out of it what you put into it. If you ended up illiterate, blame the person in the mirror tomorrow morning. My 22 year old had crappy teachers, so he took the bull by the horns and conducted review sessions for his fellow students so they could score well on the AP exams. If you just let life happen to you, you will be a miserable failure. My formal education is in molecular biology and pathogenic microbiology. I make my living as a computer scientist and electrical engineer. The skills that pay the bills were acquired by purchasing books and studying ravenously. That beats pushing a broom at Walmart and crabbing about insufficient opportunities in the field of genetics engineering.

You can lay the blame for crappy schools on the leftists who dumbed down the schools to make the underachieving minorities "feel good". The schools teach leftist claptrap today and expect little or no level of academic achievement. It wasn't boomers who set those policies in motion. It was the "greatest generation" who were the politicians and the teachers and administrators at the schools attended by the boomers. Gen X is getting the second wave of the dumbed down process.

I agree with *everything* you said. Personally I've chosen a similar path of self-education and I've lead dozens of my peers to the same trough. But I am dealing with, on a daily basis, young women who honestly don't even have a clue where to begin. They don't even know that they don't know. They have no mentors to fall back on or to give them direction. I've met women with COLLEGE DEGREES who don't know where an egg comes from or that cows and bulls aren't separate species. A woman with a BA told me that diabetes happens when a person's "liver drys up".

See, the stories I'm telling on this thread aren't aberrations. This is the norm. I bow my head to you for doing the right things and raising your children well, but you cannot continue to bury your head in the sand and pretend that there is not a serious problem. None of these folks ever made a choice to be ignorant. And when I hand them a book, they greedily eat it, demand more, and furiously ask why nobody has ever told them this before.

[familyop]

Any of us who agreed with behavior that is conducive to divorce/cohabitation are guilty of having contributed to the trend. ...ever obviously leered at another man's wife/bed-mate in front of friends? ...ever come to the "rescue" of or agreed with a woman who was complaining about her husband?

You may have heard or read about our US Constitution with regard to debtors' prisons. Many of our soldiers now in Iraq are drawing less pay than they did in their civilian jobs. Those among them who get into arrears on their "child support" (general reapportionment to divorcing women) can be imprisoned when they get home due to our Child Support Act law. Those whose wives have found other men while they were gone and accuse them of domestic violence might also send them to prison by way of our Violence Against Women Act. One such accusation (no court trial and no need for them to be present in court), and one firearm or piece of ammunition found in their possession, and they will be sent to prisons.

Those laws are unconstitutional and are certainly anti-conservative. May all in our country be subject to prisons for any debts, and may all be subject to imprisonments for mere accusations. They deserve it for allowing our Constitution to be trampled against the few.

Our peers continue to be selfish, though their children are most affected by their divorcing/cohabiting behaviors.

[Marie]

And let me try that post again!

You said: Lets get the numbers right.

I am saying: I was citing *this* paper...

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/social-security/200501/socialsecurity.pdf

Then I conclude with: The specific numbers aren't terribly important. The point we both are trying to make is the same. The load will be too great for the younger generations to bear.

A little better? 8-/

(And now I shall proofread!)

[Swiss]

Well if all this was about who gets what and who keeps what it would be one thing.

But if you look at Europe and Canada you will find that when budgets become tight with social spending that the Military suffers and then becomes a joke.

I predict we will start to see the same happening to the USA when Medicare and Social Security goes bankrupt.

[CSM]

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." ('Atlas Shrugged' 1957)

[Marie]

Our peers continue to be selfish, though their children are most affected by their divorcing/cohabiting behaviors.

Finally I found you! A Boomer who cares for his progeny enough to actually defend them. A Boomer who takes responsibility for enabling the selfish, lazy path many of his generation chose. An honest person. Thank you, thank you.

(FReep me later... I'll put your name one the list of those who will be spared after the Revolution!)

And that is a joke, people! (Perhaps a tasteless one, but *I* thought it was funny as hell!)

[Marie]

It was a pack of radicals that caused most of the disruption in the 60's along with their media pals like Cronkite and company. Look who won the Presidency in 68 and again in 72, the conservative Nixon. So the majority of voters were not radical. As time passed these radicals did not give up their cause however. They went into academia and into the media to push their agenda. They are the people we are fighting now.

You are correct. And we will win. We have truth and courage on our side.

[Controlling Legal Authority]

I think you are correct. See Generations : The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by Neil Howe, William Strauss .
They argue that regular cycles in history affirm your position.

[Controlling Legal Authority]

In an earlier post I referenced Generations : The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by Neil Howe, William Strauss . They think that the boomer generation mindset actually starts with those born in 1943.

[GOP_1900AD]

For a "war that was based on a lie?"

YOU ARE A RADICAL TOO!! FOR SHAME!

The war was to kill Communists. The war was to prevent the Communists from taking over SE Asia. IT WAS NOT A LIE!!!!

[RadioAstronomer]

Your generation really helped us out there.

I see its bash a veteran/baby boomer day.

So just what did I do that wronged you so badly? Was it because I happened to be born in the 50s? Not much choice there. Maybe I should have waited.

Let’s look back into the past a bit shall we? When I was in Europe in the 70s, I remember almost daily briefings on our status and how we would fight should the Soviets cross thru the Fulda Gap. Remember this was an all voluntary force. We were told we would more than likely only last the very first few minutes of the conflict before we were all blown to hell. However, what we did would be crucial to the long term outcome. I am very glad to have had the opportunity to stand watch and alerts day and night protecting this country from the USSR. BTW, I sat in the back seat of an F4 for many many hours doing my job.

After spending years in Tactical Air Command, in 1979 I PCSd back to the states into Strategic Air Command; went from “in theater” to “strategic”. On 1 Sept 1982 I was able to transfer from SAC to USAF Space Command on the very first day in was in existence. I ended up as one of the charter members of Space Command. Let’s see. That was during a time when there was not all the flag waving we have today, support the troops etc. Not saying that bad, just we never got such ourselves. Still that was not important. Defending the nation was.

In 1987 I left Space Command to work for NASA. First at the Cape and then onto JPL “flying” interplanetary spacecraft. After years of working on interplanetaries, Space Station, Space Shuttle, Launch operations, etc, I am now back working with the DOD.

Also, thanks to Jimmy Carter, the Vietnam era GI bill was scrapped. For those who came in after 1978, they could jump onto the new version. For those of us that were Vietnam era, it just went away. No compensation – zip, nada, nothing. So I could not use my earned GI bill to pay for my grad school. Such is life.

Also all this time, I paid my taxes, social security, and other sundry withholdings the government deemed I should pay. And after I scrimped and saved enough to finally buy a house, even though I never had children, I paid the school taxes anyway. Still I did not complain. I even went so far as to take three years out of my life to teach space science to 5^th and 6^th graders sans any pay at all. More selfish baby boomer stuff huh.

So here I am, 50ish, never took a dime in welfare, save as much money as I can, give computers to needy folks, teach kids without pay, pay all my taxes and social security, and am still helping to defend the nation.

And yet you begrudge me a little return on my SS when I am no longer able to work?

Guess I did not do enough for you it seems.

Bad RadioAstronomer for thinking you might be able to retire after working you’re a$$ off for 40 years.

I guess I really screwed you over by being born, didn’t I.

[MissRepresent]

Welcome back Missyme....I thought you were banned?

[RadioAstronomer]

We have truth and courage on our side.

If you say so.