Thanks to The Daley Gator for the Rule Five link!
Any True Believers out there under 40? You’re fucked. Excerpt:
Remember Occupy Wall Street, when thousands across the country took to the streets, sleeping in tents to protest the ultra-rich 1 percent? The occupiers’ frustration was real, but their ire was misdirected. They should have launched an Occupy the AARP movement instead.
Government policies that transfer cash from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy are the real scandal. In 1970, Social and Medicare accounted for 20 percent of federal spending. They have since grown to 40 percent; by 2030, they will be more than half. And these numbers understate the level of federal spending for the elderly. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some 28 percent of spending on Medicaid, a program designed to offer health care to families in poverty, goes to older Americans.
Yr. obdt. is forced to disagree in one respect; the Occupy Wall Street crowd weren’t misdirected, they were idiotic. But beyond that, what our Imperial Federal government has done is a cosmic leap in idiocy beyond anything the Occupy crowd ever dreamed of.
Instead of explaining this again, I’ll just present a relevant quote from the Animal Manifesto:
The entire picture of tax and fiscal policy, such as it is, by our Imperial Federal Government is an unmitigated multi-generational disaster; it is a cluster-fuck of cosmic proportions, the overarching, transcendent issue of our time. Runaway government spending and debt is the single greatest threat to the Republic today; greater than Islamic terrorism, greater than competition from Chinese manufacturing, greater than any environmental crisis. And this crisis can only be addressed in one of two ways; we can inflate our way out of it, or we can grow our way out of it. We should be doing the latter, but seem to be doing the former; the purchasing power of the American dollar is almost perfectly paralleling the decline of the Roman denarius during the decline of the Empire.
Things may well be past the point of no return. Neither party seems to have the political will to address the problem; one party seems to show some slight concern about low economic growth and the ridiculous tax system, while the other party intends to continue doubling down on bad policies. That’s not a comforting thought.
We have demagogued away our grandchildren’s future, and history will (rightly) damn us for it.
The Reason article linked above concludes: Unfortunately, there is almost no appetite in Congress for even mild reforms of Social Security and Medicare. Most lawmakers won’t touch entitlement programs, because older Americans vote. Driven by a desire to get re-elected, politicians refuse to reform the program at the core of our country’s future fiscal woes.
That behavior makes sense even if it’s deplorable. Harder to understand is why younger Americans don’t object when wealthy seniors take funds from those who can least afford it.
It’s another data point in the documentation of a fiscal calamity. As the Manifesto says, future generations will rightly damn us for it.
