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.
Can you possibly be the only one who didn't know it was about a philandering husband who wanted to be free of his disabled wife? Amazing!
You aren't discounting my work... but you insist it doesn't begin to compare...
Reminds me of the immortal words of G. K. Chesterton: "may I say that while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he is a blasted old jackass."
I'll make a deal with you: don't steal my money and redistribute it, and I won't call you a socialist or a thief. Otherwise, here's my wallet, comrade, and please don't hurt me.
Agree completely. You notice I kept quiet for years aboput my service here on FR. Just got steamed today from some of the posts about how we screwed over everyone. Sorry for getting so ticked.
And any man not married at 40 had no......
I'm pretty sure that was Churchill, anyway. He wrote a lot of stuff!
Here's a radical reply: I wish I could recover the $50,000 to $90,0000 in annual TAXES stolen from me by the socialist government. I could retire VERY comfortably. I earn plenty of money, but I don't get to keep much of it. What isn't taxed away is paying for my children to park their knees under my table. The two remaining at home will eventually join the rest of the Gen X crew welcoming people to Walmart and pushing extra large orders of fries. They got the best education the socialist teacher's unions could provide.
By your reasoning, if a veteran becomes a mugger, nobody had better dare criticize his behavior.
"spare me the"We won the Cold War" attitude, most of the people that did that are worm food now"
I am not yet 50, and see no worms munching on my body.
BTW, that "We won the Cold War" attitude is one I have.
Because I did participate in that one, for eight years.
It was an all volunteer force, at the time.
And no, I do not consider myself in the same category as any combat veteran of any war, past or present.
But let me clue you in on something, just so you do not insult me and my fellow veterans unintentionally.
If you think the USSR folded on a "bluff", you are dead wrong.
"We" were not bluffing.We knew the price, and prepared ourselves to pay it every day.That was our life.That is how I spent my young adult life.
And although the DOD denied me the opportunity to wear a uniform and "do what I did best" one more time,I and my peers, are still milling about, amongst the general civilian population.Lurking, for want of a better word.
I invite you to look closely into any of our eyes, and tell me/us we have no right to be proud that we "Won the Cold War" .
Especially around Veterans Day.
And as to the thread topic, the generational Social Security argument...
Make the cutoff date the day before my birth, and I will call all the taxes I have paid, sunk cost, and we will be done with socialism.
Better that I absorb the price of injustice, than pass it on to my child.
I, and all my "Cold War Veteran" peers, are supremely qualified to make that call.
Again your opinion....
I made the comparisson based upon the sweat of your brow.
Estate taxes are THEFT of private property. Only a damn communist would advocate stealing the private property of another person for the collective benefit of the government.
Flapdoodle. Every one of us objecting to SS robbery, has parents we either do or will care for in their old age. Our astronomer friend is after something entirely different: he wants everyone else's children to be forced to take care of him against their will. The reason he's entitled to this slave labor is... that he fought to keep them "free".
No. I paid in good faith that I would get my money back (forced BTW). I would not pay nor ask to collect SS except I am given no choice.
As for paying for my education, you most certainly did not.
Indeed I did. Go figure how much I payed in school tax all these years even though I do not nor ever had children.
No wonder you're so eager to rob me and mine.
Robbery? I have no choice but to pay into SS.
For some reason socialists usually turn out to be people who didn't provide properly for themselves.
I put 20% of my pay away for the future. I don't rely one bit on SS or any other Gov dole. I also payed my own way thru school and grad school. You see the military reniged on my GI bill after serving 12 years.
The guy who scrimps and saves isn't usually the one demanding that the government redistribute his savings.
Bet I pay more in taxes than you make.
Keep me free? Apparently, you did it with the expectation of robbing me. What's so noble about that? The noble guy keeps me free and then doesn't rob me. At least, that's my idea of noble, comrade.
Comrade? I stood the front line fighting communism. If I said what I really thought of you I would be banned from this forum. I think you get the picture however.
Cheers,
CSG
You want to talk about me, at least have the guts to ping me. No one is going to take care of me. I take care of myself and all the freeloading welfare scum of your generation as well.
...which is a stupid comparison. One's marginal revenue product is not a function of sweat. I think thoughts too large to fit in the average mill-monkey's head. Only reverse elitism would argue that this is of lower value, or that one effort is less than the other. I do what's impossible for such a person, so by what reasoning do you conclude that it suffers by comparison?
The WWII generation developed an economic powerhouse in a world where there was no other competition. That produced a false euphoria where unions demanded enormous benefits and employers allowed the excesses as the pot of gold seemed to be endless. The socialist New Deal was cooked up with a ratio of 23 to 1 workers to beneficiaries. That ratio is three to one today. Today's world has cut throat competition as the rest of the world caught up with ability to manufacture. The 'golden years' of operating without competition are over. The boomers were children in the heyday of this economic boom. They didn't cause the problems that drive all the whining in this thread. The socialist policies were cooked up from the New Deal Democrats and accelerated by the Great Society Democratic welfare state invented by LBJ.
Calm down. I assumed you were following the thread. I'm content to ping you, however.
No one is going to take care of me. I take care of myself and all the freeloading welfare scum of your generation as well.
No one is going to take care of you? Oh, I apologize--I was under the mistaken impression that you were planning to receive money confiscated from me. Now that I realize you plan to refuse the stolen funds, that changes everything.
BTW, slick use of ad-hominem. I have nothing to do with the "welfare scum" you try to connect me with by virtue of being the same age. And of course, it was clever of you to insinuate that "welfare scum" are all found in "my" generation rather than yours.
I understand. However post 279 is not just another war story.
Sorry you still DO NOT get it...
I am saying the Computer Generation has had much given to them Education, Technology, Freebies all the way..
Generations as in the World War II folks were not given the luxuries YOU have, and had to work long manual labor hours for little money and raise a family all by his lonesome, maybe that is why men of that generation were hard drinkers and distant father's...They had to work by the sweat of there brow!
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