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 know, your post #504, is really quite disgusting, and you seem like a bitter person...My parents are my biological parents, married in their early 20s, stayed married until the day my dad died, at which point they had been married for 45+ yrs, and in love with each other until the day they died...and I and my family, took care of them both at home, until they died...
And my husband and I have been married for 36+ yrs, and intend to stay married until we die..you see, we love each other...and we raised our boys, with the same love and attention we received from our parents...
Sorry that you are so very bitter, have wild nasty imaginings as to who my parents were, and what they did in life, and how they did their best to raise me and my brother..
You post, nasty as it is, reveals much about your state of bitterness, and frankly, I feel sorry for you, that you seem to get off, on ranting about something, and trying to denigrate people you know nothing about...you are truly disgusting...
Frankly, you are really gross, and out in left field, to insinuate that what advice I received from 'dad', might actually have been from the guy down the street, or some 'uncle' rather than from my own loving father....you soil his good name, with your insane rantings...
You are more than confused...you need to wash your mind out with soap...
Great map! Where's it from?
And now in your post #511, you almost compliment me, after such scathing rhetoric in your post #504...see now, I am confused...
I am very touchy about my parents...they were the best parents in the world..they loved each other madly, they loved me and my brother madly...and they worked so hard, and long, to provide for us, to discipline us, to make us into responsible adults...and when I read your post #504, well, frankly I was seething...
Because as they aged, dad was stricken with cancer, and mom got Alzheimers...and they both suffered, which seemed to unfair to such wonderful people...the only thing I could do, was take care of them and love them, because after all, they had taken care of me and loved me...I owed them everything...
So I am having a hard time reconciling your post #504 to me, with your post #511 to me...
Anyone who denigrates who my parents were, and how they conducted their lives, will find me a spitting tiger...
If I misunderstood you, I am sorry...
If not, well, my remarks stand..
Sounds like a decent approach. I switched from a 30 year to a 15 year mortgage as a first step. Later, I decided to sell off some stock to pay off the mortgage. Now I only have property taxes to pay on my primary residence. In February I purchased another house using just my state/federal income tax refunds as cash out of pocket. I still need to rent the place out. I've been too busy to get that done. It will only generate about $100/month above the principal/interest/tax/insurance, but I can write off the interest/tax/insurance and the principal becomes equity.
My property taxes amount to $300/month. Even when you own a property "free and clear", you are still "renting" it from the government on pain of confiscation for non-payment of property taxes.
I agree. Mainstream knew without a doubt we could win this conflict within months with Air Support instead of the mass casualties that went on and on with the ground troops.
I always wondered why we did not drop more naplam where it was needed to drive the VC from gaining presence twoards our troops.
The obesity problem is principally caused by lack of proper exercise. Sitting in front of the TV set watching endless hours of trash or playing video games. Sitting in front of a computer surfing the net doesn't help much in the exercise department either.
How much exercise is enough? I personally pared off 40 pounds by lifting weights 3 times a week for 20 minutes. It really doesn't take much.
300 / month property taxes on multiple properties in more than one state is not bad at all.
Excercise does no good if your diet consists of high salt and sugary foods.
How many children suffer with Diabetes now a days? Eating healthy should be government policy by allowing healthy foods to be affordable to the American family with children.
It is my belief that had we treated the SE Asian War (I've always hated the term "Vietnam War" due to its belittling of the reality of it) as a must win effort, and avoided idiotic rules of engagement meant to win over 3rd world followers of Bandungers such as Nehru, we ought to have cleaned out N. Vietnam no later than 1966 and Laos and Cambodia no later than 1968. Had we done this we'd have been waving a "hello" to the PLA along over 1000 miles of their southern border and would have prevented even some of the issues we have with them today! LBJ definitely did not have the vision thing, plus, a number of his advisors were essentially - in their hearts - more concerned with taking the late 1940s utopian "world community" notions to the bitter end than they were about rolling back Communism and furthering the interests of the US and our allies S. Vietnam and Thailand. Clarity of vision during that critical time would have made all the difference.
No, it is $300/month for the single family home where I live in Idaho. There are additional taxes on the other house that are collected as part of the $628 monthly payment to the bank. The fair market rental value for the property is around $750/month. I had to sink $2600 in to replacing the windows as the 1947 vintage wood frame, double hung windows were unattractive and dangerous. Recapturing the capital investment on the windows will have to wait until I either sell it or depreciate it. I'm inclined to hold the property indefinitely at the current time.
I'll grant you, that JFK was talked into cleaning up for the, yet again, cowardly, trashed French; but, be that as it may, the Communists WERE on the march and this was no "war to shake the coils of colonialism". The Viet Cong were to "FREEDOM FIGHTERS", as is Osama bin Laden to being a George Washington.
Was the Nam War was "fought" ( and I use that term lightly ) badly, mismanaged, micromanaged by LBJ, and that bloody McNamara and the laughably called "the best and the brightest", it was a war worth fighting and one we should have and could have won.
Body bags? The deaths of our military, in war time, is a reason to give up, not fight? Too bad that there were no T.V. cameras during WW II then...if any of us were still alive, these posts would all be in German! Oh hey...we should have had T.V. cameras for WW I ( a war we entered late, never should have been in, and fought on the wrong side; but that's a whole 'nother topic ); especially in France! Wanna talk about unnecessary deaths?
All you have are anti-war talking points and propaganda.
'71 here. I think JamesP81 is on to something.
I must say that although it was good political strategy to win against McCarthy, Nixon's promise to pull out was a grave mistake. Instead he should have pulled a Reagan and done PR during the campaign to turn around the apathy about and antipathy toward the war amongst the Silent Majority. Unfortunately he was not as skilled in PR as Reagan and he did not. If anything, Nixon could have, had he done this, come into the presidency then fixed Johnson's ailing effort and won the war properly. Had he used our best technology, everything with the exception of nukes, I estimate we'd have occupied Hanoi no later than late 1970. We would have had a bit of a challenge cleaning the Reds out of Laos and Cambodia but it would have been doable. May we not repeat Nixon's errors.
Actually, the problem was, we did not allow ground forces to invade North Vietnam and occupy territory there. Had we allowed that, the war would have been won by us quickly.
WW2 - what, a couple thou dead in one day at Iwo Jima? Indeed, modernity made us into wimps.
This author is a TOTAL RETARD, and has the same talking points as the morons in the RAT party. Tax cuts do NOT increase spending. The debt is a function of increased lunatic spending, not a result of "tax cuts".
Even if, (IF), tax cuts reduced revenue, the debt still has its #1 driver as spending, not [less] revenue. Tax cuts generally stimulate revenue (or at least keep it neutral).
It is the GOP's lunatic spending that is driving the debt higher, not the tax cuts.
"wether" is spelled WHETHER
Not "I am in the opinion...", but rather, "I am OF the opinion...."
Use spell check and learn some basic grammar, missyme. For a 49 year old/50something, you write like some badly educated 10 year old.
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