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.
who?
Yeah, right...... how did your aunt manage to have 27 abortions in one year?
I spoke of a situation where an aunt of mine was involved in multiple abortions and yes it was over the course of time when abortion was illegal....
I have never spoken to you before, and you signed up around the time I did.
Still have the house in Jacksonville? I know someone who might be interested
yeah, the second time
I don't know why you think you know me?? your profile says you signed up 9/30/2005 when did you meet me? I have never lived in Jacksonville.
Sure Missy - well thought I could help you sell the house you and your third husband had in Jacksonville - guess you don't want the help. Never mind then
Again I DO not know why you think I am someone I am not...
I asked you why you think you know me? I do not know who you are referring to.
Sorry that I have dis-appointed you here.
Normal women release an egg 11-13 times a year. The window of opportunity, for the fertilization of an egg, is a very few days.
Having an abortion means that a woman is preggers and has already missed at least one period and in 1967, you had to wait a minimum of two months, for a test to say that you are pregnant.
Sooooooooo, besides being a compulsive liar, a damned retread who was banned recently, are we now to believe that you are the niece of a biological FREAK ?
WOW! Nice to meet you too.
I never said that. I said I had an aunt who had 27 abortions before it was legalized and died in 1967. Where did I say they were all done in the course of 12 months?
Obviously, you have NO idea just WHY the Nam War was fought and are no Conservative.
You did NOT say that she had had 27 abortions when they were "illegal".
missy, it's you...just fess up.
Please read your very own post #342...to refresh your terrible memory.
Keep saying it - you tell the same stories over and over again - not to mention the exact grammar and spelling errors..... your posts are "rampid" with the same errors as when you were missyme.... lol
NO NO NO...
I said that in 1967 she had died after all her abortions and spoke of this in a couple of threads. I do not know how many years it took for her to have 27, be that they were done with a solution in the privacy of someone's home..
My name is laney, I don't know who missy is only that you and Miss represent must hate her very much.
Embarrassed to admit how you got banned before?
Oh my god, even the hyphenated words that should not be hyphenated....I had forgotten those! LOL
Alright, I will give you that..My post does reflect 27 in one year. My aunt died in 1967 after the 27 abortions. The doctor knew she must of had multiple abortions due to the fact her heart had enlarged to a gross size, and every organ in her body had been affected by the trauma.
Sorry to hear of her death - missyme had an aunt who had 27 abortions with a solution in someone's home as well.
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