A Generation of Termites?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_generation_of_termites_20110429/

The aging of the baby boom generation has not improved its reputation. Having brought immense positive change to this country, the postwar population wave is frequently castigated as a self-seeking and even selfish cohort by members of the generations that have followed, who worry that those nearing retirement will cost too much to maintain amid dimming economic prospects.

That isn’t how the boomers see themselves, of course, but that selfish stereotype is at the center of America’s budget politics these days—especially the Republican Party’s sweeping proposals to reorder priorities and reduce deficits, authored by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

The most obvious signal in Ryan’s plan is that he exempts almost all of the boomers from his scheme to abolish Medicare and replace the highly popular and successful system with vouchers that would continuously diminish in value. As the budget chairman and his colleagues confront the fury that this idea has provoked among older voters, their chief selling point is that the changes won’t affect anyone who is now 55 or over.

So they promise that if you’re in the lucky boomer contingent, there is no need to worry—and no need to concern yourself with those who someday soon will have to purchase adequate health insurance with wholly inadequate funding.

More at the link --

[HereSince1628]

1. The real mistake the baby-boomers made

was harkening to population concerns and shrinking the generation that followed us. While harkening to environmental concerns, and expanding educational access and spending more per child in terms of education and health care and more per each of our parents in terms of health care than any generation before us, we broke the demographic pyramid that kept growth-based capitalism going.

No one in the US appears to understand how to do capitalism with social consciousness without a demographic pyramid with a huge base.

[WinkyDink]

2. I'm a Boomer. I am also an only child, as is my 60-yr-old cousin. IOW: WE didn't begin the

population diminution.

[HereSince1628]

3. I've seen published numbers of between 3 and 4 children

per family for the "greatest generation" IIRC it averaged about 3.6.

Baby boomers, particularly middle-class boomers cut that number back to near 2.5 children per family on average.

[Chris_Texas]

4. Immense possitive change?

Unless, that is, you consider turning a hundred billion dollar debt into a fifteen trillion dollar debt a possitive.

One could easily go on all day listing the horrific carnage the vampire generation has caused, but there is no need. Everyone already knows. It took two-hundred years to build the America that they inherited, countless generations all devoted toward leaving behind a better nation than the one they inherited. These ancestors, together, passed along to the vampires a nation in which the america dream was all but a reality.

And like so many children of wealth and privelege they went crazy. They were an entire generation of Paris Hiltons.