Being a Boomer Means Never Having to Say I'm Sorry

Nice to see more people joining Sal's, "Boomers can bite me " bandwagon. In this case, Frank Bruni at NYT;

“If you’re going along with the status quo, it should be a crime to say that you care about our children and grandchildren, because you’re not putting your money where your mouth is,” Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who governed Nebraska for four years and represented that state in the Senate for another 12, told me recently.

This subject haunts him more and more. “If we’re trying to figure out how to advance the next generation’s future, we need to be spending more on the next generation, and we’re spending it on yesterday’s generation,” said Kerrey, 70. “I am not the future. My 12-year-old son is. But if you look at the spending, you’d think I’m the future.”

Kerrey is referring mostly to Social Security and Medicare, which, along with Medicaid, are the so-called entitlements that claim a larger and larger share of the federal budget.

He’s fixated on those sorts of numbers: According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totaled 6.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 1990. By 2010, they were 10 percent. And by 2038, such spending may represent 14.3 percent. It’s hard to see how that leaves much money for discretionary spending on infrastructure, on education, on research, on a range of investments that safeguard or improve the America that today’s young people will inherit.
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,,, May’s employment figures to confirm a much higher rate of joblessness among Americans ages 18 to 29 than among the whole population.
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We conveniently overlook how much more they’ve had to pay for college than we did, the loans they’ve racked up and the fact that nothing explains their employment difficulties better than a generally crummy economy, which certainly isn’t their fault.

They get our derision when they deserve our compassion and a political selflessness we’ve been unable to muster. While we’re at it, we might even want to murmur an apology.

Only thing I didn't like about his article was the "Millennial Bashing." Maybe that goes on in his circles, but not mine. I like them; I like them a lot.  

As for the Boomers, never before has a generation been given more from their parents, and at the same time taken so much from their children.

The math gets worse and worse the closer we get to the tipping point - and as more see the light, the more I will be able to say, "You should have taken Professor Lieberman's class in the mid-80s. He could have showed you the data then."

Math is hard ... harder when you ignore it.