In the current downturn, the vast majority of the elderly are suffering along with the young. The right cure would help both generations... Since the early 1980s, financier Peter G. Peterson has been predicting that Social Security’s excessive generosity would crash the retirement system and the economy. The late British journalist Henry Fairlie, in 1988, famously wrote a piece in The New Republic with the cover line “Greedy Geezers,” faulting the elderly for living too well at the expense of the young... The government’s general budget went into the black in 1999, and economists were projecting that the national debt...