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.
"What programs could be funded by a sell-off of federal land west of the Mississippi?"
Some of it is good land. But a lot of it is mountain and deserts. You can't build a house on a 30-degree slope and not everyone wants to live where it is 105 fahrenheit and there is no water. In many places out there, there are no jobs.
Greedy? You damn right I am and proud of it. I earned it. I expect it. I paid for the WWII generation. The X'ers will pay for mine. Get over it.
It’s not just capital gains. I earn money. I pay income tax on that money. I die – and any money I haven’t spent (if enough of it) is again taxed as a “death tax”.
In my case I was the oldest of nine, the money just wasn't there. I find it disturbing to hear how these xers whine and blame us for their lack of direction. I've raised five (19-31) and they'd all laugh at some of these kids (Well four of them would but hey, four out of five ain't bad).
Well said! Thank you. Some of us also busted our a$$es sitting in missile silos, on alert, on submarines, in the air flying, in early warning stations, etc. 24 hours a day, seven days of the week so these whiny ungrateful twerps can blame us for all their problems.
You should take your SS payments and party, you and hubby earned it with them...that's what I'm going to do.
Me too! :-)
"Anyone who wasn't a liberal at 18 had not heart, and anyone not a Conservative at 30 had no brain".
In other words, you have been painting with too broad a brush.
To hear you tell it, a person's beliefs, tastes, and character depend on his birth date. That is complete rubbish. Every large group of people will have its share of sinners and saints.
The whole idea of a "generational war" is akin to the old Marxists doctrine of "class warfare." Both are attempts to grab political power by dividing people and setting them against each other.
By the way, in your rush to demonize the so-called Baby Boomers, you seem to have overlooked some facts. For instance, the Social Security time bomb was ticking long before any of Baby Boomers were born. Likewise, the Great Society and the welfare state were in place before most of the Boomers could vote. And come to think of it, the Supreme Court that brought us Roe v. Wade was not composed of Baby Boomers either. Why do you blame the Boomer "generation" for these disastrous policies?
It will be forced euthanasia for the generation which approved abortion. All those dead babies could have been financially supporting the old.
I believe the same. However, the people that come for me aren't going to die a natural death, either. BLOAT.
...but you're definitely not a feminist. Uh huh.
Those who fought the Vietnam War were part of the so-called "Baby Boom." Is that not heroic enough for you?
Whereas we miserable slobs can fix our own computers...
Um, your end of the conversation is equally self serving. "Quitcher whining and cough up my social security, before I knock you out of your high-chairs and take it! Whippersnapper!"
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And don't forget all the drugs we did, causing a generation of idiots to be born.
Sadly, that won't happen until after they stop voting, which is when they die. Or even later, in the case of democrats.
As far as I knew growing up I came from a Conservative family. My stepdad even voted along Republican lines. Imagine my surprise in 2000 when I found out he was voting for Al Gore. Why? He was concerned about his Social Security and disability benefits. During that whole election fiasco his response was, "Since he's complaining about it, they should just give the presidency to Al Gore and be done with it."
No problemo! There's nothing to get over, except the surprise at discovering another nest of socialists on Free Republic.
I still cannot fix my computer but oh well can't do everything..
Reg: your other post..No not a feminist because I was not ever, NEVER into labeling myself...
Always thought for myself like to DO MY OWN THANG as they say..
Made mistakes, accomplished some, but I like who I am and what I am about and most people I know do too, so I say I am okay..
George Bailey said it all to me:
No man is a failure who has friends...
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