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.
Some people choose to live with reality's some choose to live in fantasy's....
Family issues are personal, not political.
Choices are made by people dealing with real live issues, then again I have much compassion for people ALL people that have issues with substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy's lonliness spousal abuse the folks you proably would spit on and kick to the curb
You don't know anything at all about me, except your own assumptions, bred from fear.
Now, let's compare and contrast a few things, shall we?
missyme.....................................laney
native born Californian.................... ditto
had a child out of wedlock................. ditto
married three times........................ ditto
had an aunt who had 27 abortions.... DITTO
couldn't spell well.........................ditto
never used spell check......................ditto
always used the nonexistant word anyways....ditto
wrote ungrammatical English.................ditto
started out trying to sound religious.......ditto
when refuted, claimed the other person was just "jealous"
Is this beginning to look like a pattern, or what? LOL
The line usually is "THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL". So, you're still off into fringe territory on that.
False compassion, or using "compassion" as a tactic to insult, is silly.
Jump up and down? JUMP UP AND DOWN? How odd.
Hmmmmmmmmm...your aunt died at the age of 37, in 1967, you say? That would mean that she was born in 1929 or 1930.
If her eldest child was then 11, that would mean that she was 26 when she had her first child, whom she hadn't killed.
If she was married to such a fine, upstanding Catholic man, who refused to even use the Catholic church's own accepted forms if birth control ( abstinence or the rhythm method ) and your claim that she had ALL ( which is a lie, since she had an abortion in 1967 ! ) 27 abortions before 1955, one can only assume that between the average age of 13, when most girls reached menarche and the age of 22 when she married her husband, was when she has those 27 abortions. And she didn't become pregnant in the first year of her marriage? You can't do simple math? You have NO idea how old your aunt was, at any point in time?
That's all of nine years and it is highly unusual, for a girl to get preggers, immediately after she has her first period! She had, on average, three, THREE abortions , every single year, from the time she was 13 through the age of 22, when she married your uncle? Your grandmother paid for all of these abortions?
Semitrailers can drive through the holes in this story!
ROTFLMAO_PIMP!
OMG! LOL_LOL_LOL
:-)
POST 702.................... PRICELESS NOPARDONS. (no comma).
Thank you...THANK YOU ! :-)
You are insane..Your attempts to insult me have only made you look like a TRUE GOOFBALL...
You don't know me nor my family, you are just some tormented soul on a power trip behind the keyboard of your computer..I feel sorry for you.
You need therapy...
you truly are odd.... Goodnight...
You posted a picture of the back of a woman on your personal page, which I assume you meant people to think is of you. The thing is, it's the picture of the final step of a balding woman, who had had a hair weave,and it's from an ad !
You've gone on and on about your aunt having TWENTY-SEVEN abortions. You claim that she was 37 when she died in 1967. But the math just doesn't add up, no matter how you slice it; none of it! And you call me names?
I can only go by what you post. I have merely quoted you and shown your fallibility and lies.
If anyone one of the two of us needs therapy, sweetums, that would be YOU! Please get the get you need so terribly and stop posting lie after lie and all of the intemperate drivel.
I know, I know. I do that. Drives my husband crazy.
You need to understand, I am not talking about your parents. I am talking about your parents' generation. This is a big difference. Many, MANY Boomers were just as much victims of social re-engineering as our generation has been.
Here's the best way I can explain it:
When Boomers call my generation lazy, uneducated, unmotivated, unfocused, selfish brats with no parenting skills or work ethic and a self-centered mentality I, in all honesty, have to agree. As a group, I'd bet that the majority do fit that description. I don't take it personally. I can look at the big picture and say, "You got a point there, sir!" Waaaay too many of my generation *do* have these problems. I'm quite sure that the majority have at least one of those issues. Taking a defensive posture and denying that fact accomplishes nothing. In fact, it enables the sickness that's infected our group and prevents people from even looking for cure.
Let me put it this way. Pointing to homosexual behavior as a contributing factor in the spread of AIDS is a truth. Just because there are plenty of homosexuals without AIDS does not make the point mentioned any less valid.
If your parents do not fit my acerbic comment, then you can be reassured that I wasn't directing my comment toward your parents.
Make a little more sense?
I was being sarcastic. You said: Dad always had us come out of our rooms eventually, and explain to him, rationally, not like a whining crybaby, exactly why were we unhappy, and what we proposed as a solution...dad helped us to talk out our problems, and helped us to see our way through to a positive result for everyone...but he would not tolerate whining...that was a no-no in our house...
What I got out of that was that you were taught not to whine by your dad and to do the right thing, etc.
My point was that *you* had the advantage of having a loving, stable two-parent home. You hold everyone else to the same standard. The problem is that the majority of my generation did *not* have that advantage. We were raised by single, working moms and we scrambled for the scraps of affection from whatever man we could find who would be willing to take five minutes to give us that gift.
I was saying that you were lucky, but that you shouldn't forget that most of *us* were not so fortunate.
(I would NEVER insult anyones mama! That is a no-no!)
And yet you begrudge me a little return on my SS when I am no longer able to work?
Point one: I never have and would never bash a vet. Never, never, never. My hubby is a career soldier and he will be going to combat in a couple of weeks. I've walked beside him through his military life for 16 years. So please let that one go.
Point two: I have no problem helping someone who is unable to support themselves.
I am frustrated because so many of you just don't see the big picture. If you guys don't seriously help us find a compromise on this SS issue, this country will be well and truly screwed for the next two generations.
I know it's not what you were promised. I know that it's not fair. I know that you all were looking forward to retirement and actually hoping you'd be fit enough to really enjoy it. But this is a Pyramid scheme and it just can't go on like this. It's not right for someone to see the numbers, see that this will bankrupt their children and their grandchildren and still insist that they deserve to play for 20 years, consequences be damned.
If a senior honestly cannot support themselves and if they don't have savings, job retirement, or family to care for them, then the burden should fall to the state. But all 70 million of you can't all go and kick your feet up at once and expect us to realistically carry that load. I'm frustrated because so many of you are in denial to that reality. Whether we *want* to carry that burden or not is irrelevant. We *can't* do it. And yet healthy, able-bodied Boomers are planning on flipping us the bird as they drive by in their RV and yelling, "Stop whining and buy me some gas!"
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
I must not have been clear. I said that *she* didn't know that cows and bulls were the same species. She though that a cow and a cow mated and made a baby cow. A bull and a bull mated and made baby bulls.
I told her that I did believe that if this ever happened, it was the seventh sign of the coming Apocalypse.
This is your quote: Dad always had us come out of our rooms eventually, and explain to him, rationally, not like a whining crybaby, exactly why were we unhappy, and what we proposed as a solution...dad helped us to talk out our problems, and helped us to see our way through to a positive result for everyone...but he would not tolerate whining...that was a no-no in our house...
Your dad was a wise man. And you remembered some advice he gave you that really would be invaluable to this situation.
So let's do as he suggests. Let's stop with the emotional snapping and talk out our problems. Lets find a solution that has a positive result for everyone.
Most of the hostility directed toward Boomers by the younger generation is born of fear. I am concerned because I am understanding that when you Boomers retire either one of two things has to happen. Either the system goes bankrupt and all of you are out on your butts or they raise the taxes on the younger generation to a horrible level that won't leave us enough to provide for our own children.
I am trying to point out that your grandkids could be actually pushed to the point of poverty by the retired Boomers. This is really going to effect them on a day to day basis.
We need to find a solution that doesn't abandon our elderly or bankrupt our younger working folks.
We are all going to have to compromise, but that means that the Boomers are going to have to give too. Right now, I will not be able to collect social security until I'm 70. Why is it ok to raise the age on Gen Xers and not Boomers?
I'm am looking forward to hearing *your* point of view and I'm open to suggestions from you on how we can fix the problem.
You are funny! (Thanks for the break!)
It's funny 'cause it's true!
They *don't* know that they *aren't*... Sorry about my double negative. I see how I confused you.
Actually, you raise in interesting (although off-topic) subject here. My son is a diabetic (12 years old) and I didn't feed him garbage. He's in great shape. From the research I've done over the last two years, type 1 diabetes in on the rise and diet and exercise is NOT linked to the problem. In addition, many of the obese children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes actually turned out to have type one.
Nobody knows why it's going up (along with Autism), but it is only doing this in Western nations. I've heard theories blaming lack of sunlight or too much gluten, diary, chemical exposures, etc.
Just and interesting point.
What laney is calling an "attack", is simply being outed as a retread; which she is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.