We Chose Decline

The People's Republic of China does not have to aggressively take our status as the premier world power. It appears that we are willingly giving it to them, sooner more than later.

As a maritime and aerospace power, especially when it comes to the challenge west of Wake, if you want to understand how serious our nation's national security nomenklatura is toward the clear threat to the place previous generations died by the hundreds of thousands to place us in the last century - just look at what we are spending our money on.

Megan Eckstein over at DefenseNews has the summary for everyone. It isn't pleasant reading, especially for those who have their eyes on the world around us. You don't have to like it, but you do have to accept the simple fact that the leadership the American people have put in charge of their security simply are not interested in funding it.

Until elections move new people in to power - and even that may not produce the needed result - we will simply have to accept that The Terrible 20s that we started talking about a dozen years ago are our future.

The title of Megan's latest is as good of a start as any;

US Navy budget would pay for 9 ships, decommission 24 amid readiness drive

Yes, that is a net loss of 15 ships. Meanwhile the PLAN grows and grows.

Like the intellectually dishonest "Integrated Defense" we covered yesterday, all this is being justified with spin and bad theory.

A couple of examples;

Meredith Berger, who is currently performing the duties of Navy undersecretary, told reporters the plan is strategy-driven and follows the chief of naval operation’s priorities of funding the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine in full and then prioritizing readiness for today, lethality for tomorrow and capacity for down the road.

The budget proposal, she said, “enables the Department of Defense’s investment in the three pillars of the National Defense Strategy: integrated deterrence, campaigning forward and building upon our enduring advantages to fulfill the strategic priorities that are identified [in] the National Defense Strategy.”

I'm sorry Acting Under, but bullsh1t. No serious person who sees what is happening on the other side of the Pacific believes that. I really am interested in what exactly you will be "campaigning forward" with ... and the rest is, as my European friends like to say, "fried air."

The U.S. Navy is requesting more money in its fiscal 2023 budget proposal compared to the previous fiscal year, but it’s still on a trajectory toward a smaller fleet.

...

The Navy’s request represents a 5% growth in spending compared to the FY22 budget Congress passed, and the Marine Corps’ request would be a 1.8% increase in spending compared to the enacted FY22 budget.

In an inflationary environment - especially accelerating inflation - these % changes and raw number increases are meaningless.

Only units matter. How many of what you can buy. Focus on that first, then the money.

Along those lines, here is where the numbers fall;

Included in the request are two Virginia-class attack submarines, two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, one Constellation-class frigate, one America-class amphibious assault ship, one San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, one John Lewis-class fleet oiler, and one Navajo-class towing, salvage and rescue ship.

...

The Navy currently has 298 ships. That would dip to 280 by FY27 under the plan pitched by the Navy.

The service proposes decommissioning 24 ships in FY23: nine Freedom-variant LCSs, five Ticonderoga-class cruisers, four Whidbey Island-class amphibious dock landing ships, two attack submarines, two oilers and two Montford Point-class expeditionary transfer docks.

The loss of LCS is a net gain for the Navy, but building two while decom'n two SSN doesn't grow that needed west of Wake capability ... and we are gutting what is needed to get personnel and gear ashore from the sea - a strange position to take when that is one of the critical requirements to conduct and sustain operations in the Pacific.

Of those 24 vessels, 16 have not yet reached the end of their service lives and would require the Navy secretary to sign a waiver to Congress, including all nine LCSs, one of the five cruisers and the two expeditionary transfer docks.

16/24=8/12=2/3

Two thirds of our ships are being decommissioned before they were even used to their designed longevity. That is damning of both our maintenance and fleet design errors of the last 30-yrs.

Speaking of submarines, let's go back to something we were discussing on the Front Porch a dozen years ago;

Let's look at 2020 again. What else is happening in the 20s? Well, for one, we will have to find money to re-capitalized the SSBN fleet. I offer to you that the 20 JAN HASC SEF Subcommittee meeting has an outstanding money discussion about that challenge. Deputy SECNAV Work has also discussed this challenge in other venues, and I think he has a very firm grasp of the problem, as do most in positions to know.

You have to look at it in the broader context of the budget as well. The hangover in the 20s from this decade's drunken frenzy of spending will couple with another cohort of Baby Boomers retiring and putting stress on the budget in ways we still do not have a firm grasp on.

In 2020 - that ship built in 1990 will be at 30 years. That LCS built in 2009 will only have 9 years or so of service life (LCS is expected to only last 20-25 years) - so by the end of the 2020s, LCS will be dropping like flies.

When you consider that we will be limited this decade to LCS and DDG-51 for our non-amphib surface ship program (don't throw JHSV at me, that is just a truck - full stop - all else is spin and hope) - you have about a perfect story for the 20s of limited shipbuilding funds and a stunted fleet.

No one - at least here - should find this from Megan's article even a little bit surprising;

He also noted that 21% of the shipbuilding budget supports the Columbia program — which doesn’t affect the ship count for FY23 since the Navy is not buying a new ship this year but rather is incrementally paying for the lead ship bought in FY21 and buying parts for the upcoming FY24 ship.

...

The Columbia program will grow to consume 30% of the shipbuilding budget once it moves into one-per-year procurement later this decade. As a result of this pressure, surface ship programs may be scaled down.

A month before the above post from FEB2010, we also had this CDRSalamander post - again from over a dozen years ago;

 We did this to ourselves - and in the budget environment everyone who wanted to has seen for the last half decade, the simple math that the Tiffany Navy forces us to use tells us that there was no way we would reach 313, 300, or even hold fast at 283.

Further evidence continued to mount last spring, when the administration submitted a shipbuilding budget that would only support the construction of eight ships.

In just a few short years, this level of funding will produce a 240-ship fleet, given that a typical Navy warship has an expected life of 30 years.

We will be lucky if we can hold 240 - as we have been discussing here for the last few years.

What is happening on the aviation side of the house?

... it plans to retire 24. It is asking for 96 aircraft, but no F/A-18 Super Hornets and fewer carrier-variant F-35C Joint Strike Fighters than last year. It’s also proposing a decrease of about 10,000 sailors to crew the fleet in the next five years.

...

Of note, the five Advanced Hawkeyes and the 26 TH-73A helicopter trainers in the budget request would be the last in the program before the production lines end.

The three V-22 Ospreys the Navy is buying this fiscal year and the nine the Marines are buying would be the last for that production line as well, with the services listing zero in their request for FY23 and in the four following years.

10,000? Do you know anyone in a sea-going command who thinks they are overmanned?

I repeat my standard once again; if you believe war in coming west of Wake, time is short. Under no circumstances should any production line of aircraft or ships be allowed to go idle until there is an immediate production of that platform's replacement. 

We cannot afford to allow us to lose in the mid-20s the ability to produce E-2 or MV-22 or F/A-18...anything until their replacements are in production. 

We need serious people for this serious time.

We will have to wait.

From Those to Whom Much is Given

Wrongs can be put right. In a free society, it can just take time - but more often than not - you get there.

In one of the more shameful events of a shameful time in our nation's history, it a fit of self-serving narcissistic pique, those who were receiving the greatest advantage in life from the greatest nation on our little planet decided that the hard work of ensuring liberty was for the little people;

As a young chemistry professor at Yale University in 1969, Gary Haller voted to boot the U.S. military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program off the Ivy League school's Connecticut campus.

Like many American schools at the time it was gripped by protests against the Vietnam War. Yale's faculty considered the presence of ROTC, which trains future officers and provides college scholarships, to be tacit support for an unpopular war.

"People were just so outraged," Haller said.

The actual reasons and motivations were a bit more nuanced than that, but we should let the past be the past. Let them comfort themselves with their little fairy tales - they and we know their reasons.

Regardless, that has changed - and for the better for us all;

Four decades on, however, he views the ROTC through a different lens. “We want to produce students who are leaders in every segment of our society," said Haller, now an emeritus professor who led a faculty committee that helped pave the way for the ROTC's return to Yale. "Whether you like the military or not, it is a big segment of our society.”

On Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited his alma mater for the first commissioning since the Vietnam era of cadets and midshipmen who participated in the program for all four years of college.

The ceremony is the latest evidence of a sea change in the attitude of elite universities, which shunned the military for four decades in part because of its controversial "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy for gay personnel. Now they have come to realize that their graduates should have as much influence on a major instrument of American power as they do in the halls of the White House or the trading desks of Wall Street.

The return of ROTC to Ivy League campuses is a return to the norm that prevailed for more than 200 years, when graduates routinely marched, flew and sailed from campus to combat.

"I really do believe deeply that ROTC needs to be back on campuses like ours so that our students can have a truly hands-on, active role in shaping the next military," said Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway, whose father served in the Air Force.

John Lewis Gaddis, a prominent Yale historian who supported ROTC's return, said he was always struck by how few students had ever met anybody in the military.

Carter referenced that in his speech on Monday, noting that the ROTC graduates had "helped bridge a divide that has persisted for too long." "For some of your classmates, you're the first member of the military they've ever gotten to know."

For the record, the DADT excuse was just a holding action from the last holdout red diaper brigade, which we all knew at the time.

A small but correct gesture is to get ROTC back, even in small numbers. For those who wrongly like to badmouth this generation of young men and women, they are showing by their actions how they feel about serving their nation compared to those who came before. Keep that note handy.

Having more people from Yale and other top-tier schools serve will help bring the full perspective to citizenship to the Ivy League that needs to be there. For better or worse, those schools produce a high percentage of our nation's leaders, this will help everyone.

As a Southerner, my worldview towards service was skewed by the Old South and Tidewater sub-cultures I was raised in; military service in the upper-middle and even upper classes was not that unusual. In many families, it is almost mandatory. Once in the Fleet, it became apparent to me that other parts of the nation did not share the same feeling of obligation or interest in serving.

Spend some years in the military and you see that wardrooms are not balanced. Those of us who came from well to do families were almost all from Old South, Tidewater, and a higher than expected percentage of upper-Midwest families. Most were from land grant university type schools, with a few Washington & Lee, VMI, Citadel, William & Mary, Sewanee etc types thrown in for flavor. Part of that is culture, part of that is opportunity. When you included the not insignificant percentage of, "the military is a family business" officers - an upper-class Ivy League Yankee was along the lines of a unicorn sighting. 

We now have one less excuse for the part of society to whom much is given, to do what is expected. This in a small measure will produce a more well-rounded military, and a better perspective of military service among what, sadly, we can call the ruling class.

Back in July 2004 (yes, I have been blogg'n that long), I summarized this issue in a more personal way;

...a big advantage to getting more of the elite to VOLUNTEER to serve their country for a few years so I will have more people at work that understand Lacrosse and field hockey.

A little confession here; sorry Shipmates, I faked interest in NASCAR when the topic came up. One has to do what one must do to survive.

Enough of me. Bravo Zulu to the new Ensigns and Second Lieutenants.  You, your country, and your peers will all be better for your service.

Diversity Thursday

This is actually a DivThu I'm going to enjoy writing; another "macro" DivThu as a reminder why we roll this up the hill every THU.

Make no question, we are in an intellectual, political, and cultural war for the soul of our republic. Remember, the USA is not an ethnic, or really even geographic nation - we are a nation of ideas. We are an experiment in self-governance by a people united, but very different; as different as Taos, NM is to Bath, ME. Alike in interests, but very different in perspective. A work in progress and as imperfect as any human institution, but we have lasted as long as we have because of the ongoing pursuit of a fair rule of law to support individual liberty.

We are always on a journey - but can only see a destination you can never really reach; a destination that changes in place and appearance with each step forward, but still an attractive place to strive for. That should be OK. One of the best aspects of the human condition is the striving, it is what keeps you active and alive. To be sated is to be finished with the striving. That is being dead.  

There are some who don't like the journey, they don't like positive change. They are in fear of others progress and unity of purpose, they are envious of the success of one path that though is good for the whole, is bad for their own selfish reasons.

There are others who get stuck - they get stuck in a period of time and a construct that at one moment in their life helped them understand the natural chaos around them. In that flash, they found if not peace, then at least understanding. Anything that breaks the spell of that moment in time causes panic, anger, and depending on the person, dispair.

There are others who may at that one moment in time - usually an unalloyed idealism - find the messy, human reality of the now so dystopic that they look to horizons to a better place, a place more often than not the natural progression of their unalloyed idealism. They want to go to that place, but they find barriers - or what they perceive as barriers - between them and that wonderful place they want to go to. Impatient at those things that are in their way, they get angry. They lash out. They look for shortcuts. Instead of work, adjust, and move, they hack and thrash.

Those two types of people often eventually find themselves at a third place that some malevolent personalities start at on Phase 0. Hate. They find nothing in this human existence that they find good and worth refining; they simply hate.

I use that word intentionally - as I am want to say; words mean things. As a lot of people hate when I use wiki anything, I'm going to use that reference.

Two things; first from Wikipedia;

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness.[1] More recently, the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines hate as a "deep, enduring, intense emotion expressing animosity, anger, and hostility towards a person, group, or object."[2] Because hatred is believed to be long-lasting, many psychologists[who?] consider it to be more of an attitude or disposition than a temporary emotional state.

Now definition #2 of the verb, hate, from Wiktionary;

hate (third-person singular simple present hates, present participle hating, simple past and past participle hated)
...
2. (transitive, slang) To dislike intensely due to envy.

Perfect.

There, ground set.

This Tuesday's election has been quite nice for me because it helps those of us who are right of center. At least my wing of the party of one, the Evangelical Conservative Libertarian Anarcho-syndicalist Communalist party, I have tired of not just the "war on woman" psychoslander, but the whole sexistracisthomophobic verbal tic that otherwise sane friends left of center have been prattling over and over like some tweeking parrot towards anyone who might be now, or have ever been, a Republican.

It isn't just the anti-intellectualism of the argument, it is the inaccuracy of it all. There is never a center or nuance with these people - there is only their side and Satan.

Yes, you can find that attitude all over the place Ms. Moralequivalence, but really. Check the tape.

Keeping with the illogic of it all, after asking for actual examples of what they say that goes beyond the individual idiot you can find in any group, they cannot really give you any facts to back up their slander. Sure, they can give you a metric butt-ton of emotion and foam-flecked rage, but nothing of this world. After a bit of back and forth, they eventually ask you to prove a negative, "Show me that the Rethuglicans are not sexistracisthomophobic you teabagging $)*)#(*$)!"

Sigh. This is when I become an optimist. Why? Well, because I know something that most GenX types have known since they were about 10, not much is going to get fixed until the Baby Boomers start to leave their mortal coil and let the rest of us repair the mess they leave behind. Each year we get closer.

Sure, GenX has its issues in hurting the intellect of GenY with such prep-school poseurs like Touré, but who said we are perfect.

You see - I know that my generation is just a place holder - the last non-medicated youth generation whose sole purpose is to separate GenY (nee Millennials ) from their nemesis, The Boomers.

On DivThu, it is a time to reflect that thing are going to be just fine. If you know what you are, yet you cannot prove a negative - how do you counter a slander?

Simple - show by your actions what you are.

Republican Elise Stefanik has become the youngest woman elected to Congress in history, winning her race against Aaron Woolf in New York's 21st open district 56-32, ABC News projects.

She's the first Republican to win the district, which had been held by Democratic Rep. Bill Owens since 1993.

Stefanik, 30 ...

Build your farm team;

A West Virginia University freshman who did most of her campaigning out of her dorm room became the youngest state lawmaker in the nation Tuesday.

Republican Saira Blair, a fiscally conservative 18-year-old, will represent a small district in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, about 1½ hours outside Washington, D.C., after defeating her Democratic opponent 63% to 30%,

From the heart of the former Confederacy, GenX's best will help where it can;

South Carolina's Tim Scott on Tuesday became the first African-American senator to win election in the South since Reconstruction.
...
Scott's win also made him the first African-American in U.S. history to be elected to both the House and the Senate

Speaking of the South, that land so fertile and rich, do I need to mention that both South Carolina and Louisiana's Republican Governors are of South Asian extraction? No, that is old news that breaks the left's narrative, I forgot.

Well ... those Republicans are still as white bread as white bread can be. Especially with those uptight religions enclaves where they are most comfortable - places like lily-white Utah where they can hide from diversity!

In Utah, Mia Love became the first black Republican woman — and first Haitian American — elected to Congress.
...
Though more than 60 percent of the state’s people identify as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church is just 3 percent black.

Anyway, Republicans are just a bunch of old white men;

Tom Cotton would be the youngest U.S. senator. Current youngest is Chris Murphy, born in 1973.

OK, two out of three - as if there is anything wrong with that, is there?

Do I need to go any further? No, not really. Like many of you, I have tired of asking people, "Who are you talking about? What bubble do you live in? I don't see any of those attitudes predominate anywhere. This is 2014 and the Republican Party, not the 1963 Democrat Party."

There is the problem. When you found your happy spot somewhere between LBJ's first and Nixon's second administration - you really cannot relate to the world around you in the middle of the second decade of the 21st Century.

The Republican Party's future is winning over their retrograde-minded peers, like, well - you know who.

...Sandra Fluke lost her bid for a seat in the California state Senate. ... to Democrat Ben Allen in California’s 26th District. ... the Santa Monica-Malibu school board member held a 22-point lead over Fluke

So, I'm quite happy to have Tim and Tom be the "face" of the men of the Republican Party, with Mia, Elise, and Saira covering the double-X.

You see, the left is wrong about the future - they have to be wrong. In order for our republic to survive, it must strive to be inclusive and as color blind as possible. To focus on the upper-brain level ideas that bring us together, not a focus on brain-stem sectarianism that drives us apart.
  
As you face the Diversity Bullies from the Commassariat of Inclusion while being forced to endure their cancerous and sectarian presentations, feel sorry for them. They are locked in the past. If you are of a mind to do so, with a calm and slightly sad face, ask them, "Why are you so focused on separating us in to groups, to divide us? Why aren't you focused on bringing us together?"

Let the fun ensue.

Let the left soak in their slander, bask in their hate - just keep doing what you do and be who you are. In time, the truth comes out.

The left? They can have sorry Sandra and, of course, someone I consider the perfect embodiment of the Baby Boomer leftist female, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), to whom it is always 1973.

---

UPDATE: Hey;

Challenger Will Hurd has defeated incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego in Texas' massive 23rd District to become the state's first black Republican congressman since Reconstruction.

Hurd is a 37-year-old former CIA officer. He prevailed in one of the most hotly contested and expensive congressional races in the country. It was one of just a few of Texas' 36 U.S. House seats considered to be seriously competitive.

Hurd and Gallego fought for a district that stretches about 500 miles, from San Antonio to El Paso. The area has a Hispanic population of almost 70 percent.

The 52-year-old Gallego was elected in 2012, after a long career in the Legislature. Republicans maintained a commanding majority of Texas' seats in Congress.

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.
...
,,, May’s employment figures to confirm a much higher rate of joblessness among Americans ages 18 to 29 than among the whole population.
...
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.

Friedman Goes Salamander on the ..... Boomers?

Skippy, you may want to go get your smelling salts. 

Yes, the NYT's Thomas L. Friedman has, for all intents and purposes, echoed our inditement of the most selfish generation this nation has ever begat; given the most by their parents - taking the most from their children.

Pure generational theft.

After we baby boomers get done retiring — at a rate of 7,000 to 11,000 a day — if current taxes and entitlement promises are not reformed, the cupboard will be largely bare for today’s Facebook generation. But what are the chances of them getting out of Facebook and into their parents’ faces — and demanding not only that the wealthy do their part but that the next generation as a whole leaves something for this one?
...
Whenever Druckenmiller (a friend) is challenged by seniors, who also come to his talks, that he is trying to start an intergenerational war, he has a standard reply: “No, that war already happened, and the kids lost. We’re just trying to recover some scraps for them.”

With graph after graph, they show how government spending, investments, entitlements and poverty alleviation have overwhelmingly benefited the elderly since the 1960s and how the situation will only get worse as our over-65 population soars 100 percent between now and 2050, while the working population that will have to support them — ages 18 to 64 — will grow by 17 percent. This imbalance will lead to a huge burden on the young and, without greater growth, necessitate cutting the very government investments in infrastructure, Head Start, and medical and technology research that help the poorest and also create the jobs of the future.
...
At the Harlem Children’s Zone, explains Canada, “we have made a promise to all of our children: you play by the rules, do well in school, avoid drugs, gangs, crime and teenage pregnancy, and we will get you into college and on your way down the path of the middle class” and toward a future of financial security. But, he adds, “the current spending on my generation — I’m 61 — if it continues unabated, will erase any chance my children will have the safety net of social, education and health services they will need. It seems deeply offensive to me that we will be asking these poor children from Harlem to subsidize a generation that is, by and large, more well-off than they are, and then leave them deeply indebted in an America that had eaten the seed corn of the next generation.”

Read it all ... and then watch the following video.

Facing the Hard Truth of the Future We Made

HSBC's chief economist Stephen D. King over at NYT lays out very well what we have been discussing here on a regular basis over the years; the Western Welfare State is an illusion, and by pretending that you can keep the dream going longer by mortgaging in the name in the unborn - you only make the eventual reckoning worse;

AS bad as things in Washington are ... they are going to get much worse, for the United States and other advanced economies, in the years ahead.
...
the numbers no longer add up. Even before the Great Recession, rich countries were seeing their tax revenues weaken, social expenditures rise, government debts accumulate and creditors fret thanks to lower economic growth rates.

We are reaching end times for Western affluence. Between 2000 and 2007, ahead of the Great Recession, the United States economy grew at a meager average of about 2.4 percent a year — a full percentage point below the 3.4 percent average of the 1980s and 1990s. From 2007 to 2012, annual growth amounted to just 0.8 percent. In Europe, as is well known, the situation is even worse. Both sides of the North Atlantic have already succumbed to a Japan-style “lost decade.”
...
Adam Smith discerned this back in 1776 in his “Wealth of Nations”: “It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state.”

The decades before the French Revolution saw an extraordinary increase in living standards (alongside a huge increase in government debt). But in the late 1780s, bad weather led to failed harvests and much higher food prices. Rising expectations could no longer be met. We all know what happened next.

When the money runs out, a rising state, which Smith described as “cheerful,” gives way to a declining, “melancholy” one: promises can no longer be met, mistrust spreads and markets malfunction. Today, that’s particularly true for societies where income inequality is high and where the current generation has, in effect, borrowed from future ones.
...
Not knowing who, ultimately, will lose as a consequence of our past excesses helps explain America’s current strife. This is not an argument for immediate and painful austerity, which isn’t working in Europe. It is, instead, a plea for economic honesty, to recognize that promises made during good times can no longer be easily kept.

That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.

In his “Future of an Illusion,” Sigmund Freud argued that the faithful clung to God’s existence in the absence of evidence because the alternative — an empty void — was so much worse. Modern beliefs about economic prospects are not so different. Policy makers simply pray for a strong recovery. They opt for the illusion because the reality is too bleak to bear. But as the current fiscal crisis demonstrates, facing the pain will not be easy. And the waking up from our collective illusions has barely begun.

Read the whole thing, especially how he outlines the "5-Factors."

The first second order effect of this decoupling for the military - something whose preface is already starting - will be that perfect storm we call the "Terrible 20s." So much will have to be recapitalized at the same point that all the economic chips are going to be called - then end result will be a quickening in the decline of the real military capabilities of the USA not seen since the 1920s. We will be OK and will still have significantly more capabilities than anyone else - if we plan to adjust accordingly. On a percentage basis, we are heading towards 2-2.5% GDP on the military in the next few years and should be ready to be close to 1.5% to 2% by the end of the 2020s. That is what we should be planning for.

In 2012 we spent 4.4%; UK 2.5%. Don't close your eyes, lean in and focus more clearly.

Waking up from the waking up of history

Take a deep breath ... because some of you - MTH call your office - are going to be upset. Join me in a little bit of bone picking with the CNO.

I first got wind of something that made me nod with approval in the latest Armed Forces Journal;

... the service is embracing — or re-embracing — the Cold War-era discipline known as emissions control.

In a recent exercise, for example, the crew of the aircraft carrier Nimitz practiced turning off all its trackable emissions, from radars and navigation systems to computers and even Wi-Fi. What initially took an hour eventually took just three minutes.

It’s a skill once employed against the Soviet Navy, then left to atrophy. Now it is being championed by Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations. “What our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is something that finds and tracks a radar,” Greenert told attendees at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space convention. “If you control your own emissions, you control the future of warfare.”

Maybe, maybe not. But resurrecting EMCON is a good step.

No kidding. EMCON is one of those things in the last decade and a half we got overconfident on; lazy and sloppy - so it is outstanding news that we are making an effort to, sigh, re-invent the wheel. Wheels are good. It looks like we are going to re-learn EMCON. Good; BZ to all and trophies for everyone.

My second thought was what happened to "those guys" who used to give us a good "EMCON Audit," for the lack of a better description, to let us know if we are REALLY conducting EMCON?  I hope we fully utilized those guys, otherwise we are just doing the EMCON equivalent of writing our own FITREP. All those bluetooth devices and such .... good though, very good start.

Then I found the speech the above quote came from; the CNO's speech at the Sea Air Space Lunch on 08 April 2013.

Like all well mentored Evangelicals, when someone quotes you a Chapter and Verse, make sure and go to the original text and read then 10 Verses before and after so you can get the proper context.

Well, that is when Tigger became Eeyore again. The quote;

But you’ve got to change the mindset. The kids have got to understand the
significance of it because we haven’t really looked at this for well, generations. So many of them sort of understand it. If they’re a cyber warrior they get it big time. But the day - to - day people out at sea, we really haven’t laid that out for them. They don’t understand the idea of real EM hygiene.

They know cyber hygiene now. They know how to put a thumb drive in, at least many of them do, and insert their own virus. But similarly, we’ve got to understand you don’t just turn stuff on. You just don’t start radiating, rotating and radiating.

When I get the intel summaries today and they find out somebody’s got a new whatever, by far what our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is some [inaudible] finds and tracks a radar or something that provides a seeker, is a seeker that is outside our frequency band, low probability of intercept, something that we just [inaudible], we don’t have there.
It’s not a new boom as much. It’s in a whole new realm. That’s kind of where a lot of our potential adversaries are going.

You go to school today. If you’re going to study Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, you’re going to employ it on a ship. Forty weeks. Today if you go to school, we send our kids to school, and you’re going to look at what’s called a SLQ-32 which is our electronic warfare main piece of gear, to a two week school. So we’ve got to get kind of the mindset changed out there and see what we think about it.

No, no, no, and damblit, no!

1. Stop calling young Sailors "kids." These are men and women, all Sailors. Don't sound so bloody patronizing to those who put their lives on the line every day, and tomorrow you may order to kill and be killed, it is disrespectful.

2. It hasn't been "generations" it has been singular - "Generation." We stopped taking EMCON seriously when I was a mid-grade LT, the mid-1990s. If you consider that a generation takes leadership control when they are at roughly the 30-yr of service mark; that would be the earliest cohort who started service in 1965. That would be ... yes; the Baby Boomer generation.  Funny, for a generation that spent the balance of their career in the Cold War, one would think they would cling to EMCON - but oh well, I guess they were going to try to transform out of that hard work. Let's see, Gen-X hits the 30-yr mark in about three years .... 'Nuff said.

3. It isn't that "the kids" don't "understand" EM hygiene - it is that their leadership has not made it a priority and trained them on it. If you fail INSURV, you don't say, "The kids just don't understand PMS .... " Really. Don't blame the younger generation - they are fine - it is the leadership's priority for the last couple of decades that is the issue.

4. So, intel is reminding us that our potential enemies are learning institutions that won't just sit there and let us kill them? You mean they won't grant us supremacy in all warfare areas? How is that fair? Really? What great insight; that must rate a warfare pin or something.

5. TLAM school takes as much time as from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Henderson Field? Ummmm .... which one is that again? 40-weeks? Really?  As for the SLQ-32 at 2-weeks; I'm OK with that. If you don't like the product - revamp the curricula. BTW, SLQ-32 has been around since the 1960s and the program to replace it was started in the 1990s, I think. I'm not sure how many cancels and restarts we are on this, but SLQ-32 will be around awhile longer methinks. 

I'm sorry, but I'm in a nit-picking mood. If this wasn't the CNO - the most senior uniformed officer in the Navy - and from a navy.mil URL, then perhaps it wouldn't bother me; but .... who is approving the transcripts from the CNO?

So years and year ago, the Cold War, we actually had our mission control down pat. That’s a picture of the America in a fjord, way back in the ‘70s, early ’80s, where we snuck this thing upunder [MCON] and parked her up there. We measured very closely if anybody knew that ship was being followed of [inaudible], if anybody could track this thing, and we found that they couldn’t. We were pretty good at [MCON] and we’ve gone away from it. Now we need to get back.

So recently we took the Nimitz and we said okay, we’re going to, in an exercise called Valiant Shield. We said we want you to turn all of your [EN] stuff off. So they said, in [inaudible] condition and whatever. It took over an hour to get everything turned off. You turn the big stuff off, and it starts coming down, and somebody’s going what the hell is that? Somebody turn that off. What is that? It’s anything from WiFis to computers to you name it that we’re pulling out there.

Hey, I love what they did for VALIANT SHIELD, and I hope they do it as a normal part of workups - but can we first of all take care of something a 1943 WAVE YN3 would never let cross her desk?

Sub-par Staff work people. It is EMCON not MCON. Never say your boss is [inaudible], that is just rude. Talk to the Staff, they'll tell you what he meant. If this is what we do for our top officer, what are we doing for lesser mortals? Very bad messaging.

Oh, speaking of EMCON and aircraft carriers - we've got EMALS all patched up now? How about with rail guns in the future?

With a red hat; targeting with nothing but EW ... a little sporty, but very effective.

EMCON is back? Good - so is tracking ballistic missile submarines in open ocean. If you need some pointers on that, drop me a line.

---

UPDATE: More fail over at SB if you need additional facepalm to get your week started off right.

Generational Warfare: GenX has been at it from day 1

Matt Towery outlines for you what we've talked about here for years - the Greatest Generation beget the Worst Generation.

As an-early cohort Gen-X type, of course none of this is news to me. I've had to wade through their cultural and economic debris my whole life - something outlined very well by Douglas Copeland in his 1991 fun romp, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (dogs eating from discarded bags of yuppie liposuction fat still makes me wince).

What was once funny and irritating is now existential in its threat. Matt, over to you;

Regardless of how the so-called "fiscal cliff" ends, one thing is clear: The combined group of Americans whose age comprises either the last few years of the "baby boom," which is said to have ended in 1963, and most of the so-called "Generation X," which followed and ended in 1984, will collectively get the worst end of a deal that, as a whole, they do not want — when and if ever Congress and the president quit playing their games of alternative threats and capitulation.

That particular "Forgotten Collective Generation" should be mad as hell — particularly those between the age of 55 and 35. The combined vote of that age group, no matter what survey one uses, was in the majority against President Obama and has a disdain for government in general.

... math tells us that by the time these folks start to reach the age of eligibility that now exists, they either won't be eligible, or the costs they share will be sky-high, or the quality of care will be so regulated, limited and uncaring that it won't come close to resembling the Medicare program their parents or older siblings enjoyed.

Particularly if one is on the younger side of this unfortunate group, don't count on that little statement you receive telling you what you have contributed and what you would receive down the road. The math says it is impossible — particularly if you are contributing to the "fund" at a higher level.

And of course these folks in general will have the great honor of having to work years longer than many of their parents or older brothers and sisters (I know there are many exceptions, so don't think I don't feel your pain, too, remaining boomers and seniors).

The same goes for Social Security, which is not really a separate fund or trust, just another growing obligation for a debt-ridden nation.

Read it all.

Yes, those Boomers

Yep - I'm going after the Boomers again; but as an early-cohort Gen-X type, I have been at them for over two decades. 

Why on a maritime focused national security blog? Well, it's my blog for one, second - a nations economic and fiscal security is the primary determination of it's ability to build a national defense. 

On the attack with me this time is Jim Tankersley of The Atlantic via BusinessInsider. Just a teaser for you - read it all.

Ultimately, members of my father's generation--generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964--are reaping more than they sowed. They graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids. One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations. The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the first boomers began working until last year, when they began to cash out their retirement. (The growth trend over the 12 years since I entered the workforce suggests that the Dow will double exactly once before I retire.) They will leave the workforce far wealthier than their parents did, with even more government promises awaiting them.

Boomers will be the first generation of retirees to fully enjoy the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; because Social Security payouts rise faster than price inflation, they will draw more-generous retirement benefits than their parents did, in real terms--at their children's expense. The Urban Institute estimated last year that a couple retiring in 2011, having both earned average wages, will accrue about $200,000 more in Medicare and Social Security benefits over their lifetimes than they paid in taxes to support those programs. Those retirees and near-retirees bequeath a shambles to their offspring. Young people are unemployed at historically high levels. Global competition is stronger than ever, but American institutions have not adapted to prepare new workers for its challenges.

Boomers have run up incomes for the very wealthiest Americans, shrunk the middle class, and, via careless borrowing and reckless financial engineering, driven the economy into the worst recession in 80 years. The Pew Research Center reports that middle-class families today are 5 percent less wealthy than their parents were at the same point in their lives, after adjusting for inflation, even though families today are far more likely to include two wage earners. Another Pew report shows that those ages 55 to 64 are 10 percent wealthier today, even after the Great Recession, than Americans of that age bracket were in 1984. Those younger than 35 are 68 percent less wealthy than the same bracket was in 1984.

P. J. O'Rourke Puts His Generation on Report

P.J. was one of my favorite writers when I was in college. I tried to read everything of his, and still do.

Nice of him to give a Gen-X fan some top cover - because he is exactly right about his generation.

Never before has a generation been given so much cultural capital, only to throw it away and let younger generations behind them to clean up their mess.

... I suspect there’s a sadder reason for America’s post-eminence in things tremendous, overwhelming, and awesome.

My sad generation of baby boomers can be blamed. We were born into an America where material needs were fulfilled to a degree unprecedented in history. We were a demographic benison, cherished and taught to be self-cherishing. We were cosseted by a lush economy and spoiled by a society grown permissive in its fatigue with the strictures of depression and war. The child being father to the man, and necessity being the mother of invention, we wound up as the orphans of effort and ingenuity. And pleased to be so. Sixty-six years of us would be enough to take the starch out of any nation.

A Boomeresque Gift to the Boomers

"Everyone gets a trophy" we like so snicker at the Baby Boomers and their self-esteem cultish habit they gave us.

Well, we can add to that, "Everyone gets a MUC."

Sigh.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert signed the award, which is expected to be presented July 20 at ceremonies in Bangor, Wash., and Kings Bay, Ga., where the boomers are homeported, a spokeswoman said.

Sailors who served aboard one of the 14 ballistic-missile submarines from July 16, 2007, to Jan. 28, 2011, will be eligible to wear the midlevel (sic) unit commendation, a unit award equivalent to the Bronze Star.

During this time frame, these 14 boats "conducted over 119 deterrent patrols," said Submarine Force spokeswoman Cmdr. Monica Rousselow, who estimated 4,500 sailors are in the boomer fleet.

In addition to these boomers, sailors assigned to Submarine Groups 9 and 10, Submarine Squadrons 17 and 20, and Naval Submarine Support Centers Bangor and Kings Bay are also eligible to wear the MUC.

"Task Force 134 and 144 demonstrated high standards in day-to-day operations, in exercises, in training and every time they went to sea," according to the citation ...

You did your job, in other words.

COMSUBFOR has the citation on his blog.

For meritorious service from 16 July 2007 to 28 January 2011. Commander, Task Force 134 and Commander, Task Force 144 (CTF134/144) excelled in support of United States Strategic Command’s flawless execution of its global mission of strategic deterrence. The Task Forces provided an essential leg to our nation’s strategic triad and were a key element of our deterrent mission. The deterrence mission executed by Task Force 134 and 144 during this period underpinned Department of Defense strategy and provided the backbone and foundation for our political leadership in execution of national security policy. Providing credibility to the deterrent force, Commander Task Force 134 and 144 demonstrated high standards in day-to-day operations, in exercises, in training, and every time they went to sea. By their truly distinctive achievements, unrelenting perseverance, and unfailing devotion to duty, the officers, enlisted personnel, and civilian employees of Commander Task Force 134 and Commander, Task Force 144 reflected credit upon themselves and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

Sigh. I really wish we would return to a Commonwealth ideal of awards vice a North Korean ideal.

Generational Warfare II: Electric Boogaloo

Jeff Jacoby nails it on why - believe it or not; the youth candidate actually is Mitt.

‘I Don’t mean to be flip with this,’’ said Mitt Romney during a q-and-a with students at the University of Chicago last week. “But I don’t see how a young American can vote for a Democrat.’’ He cheerfully apologized to anyone who might find such a comment “offensive,’’ but went on to explain why he was in earnest .

The Democratic Party “is focused on providing more and more benefits to my generation, mounting trillion-dollar annual deficits my generation will never pay for,’’
...
Washington’s staggering spending binge is entailing a burden of fearsome proportions on the millennial generation — voters in their late teens and 20s. With the government more than $15.5 trillion in debt and continuing to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends , Generation Y is in for a prolonged economic beating. The national debt now exceeds the entire annual output of the US economy. Millennials will be paying for it through higher taxes, slower growth, reduced public services, fewer jobs, lower incomes, and a more uncertain future than their parents or grandparents confronted.

With, of course, the help of their father - my kids get it and none of them can even drive yet.

This is exactly what this unbearable debt we are taking on is - giving the older generations guv'munt jobs, goods, and services the nation cannot afford by taking out loans in the name of children - and doing it at a peacetime rate that is unheard of in modern history.

It is smart to point out who is to blame, and who is going to have to fix it. The cut off is 55 for most "ideas" - so you know what that means. The tail end of the Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Mellennials are going to eat it - the question is how hard.

The earlier we act - the less pain we will have. We can take a hit like Germany did earlier last decade - or we can implode like the Greeks. The chance to be Germany actually passed us a few years ago - best case now is the UK ... but we are trending towards Greece and Spain at this rate.

If the youth really were voting their interests - they wouldn't be voting for the Democrats this cycle; unless of course their interest is to be the indentured servants of the Boomers.

Charting the Boomer Legacy

OK Boomer apologists ..... let me just give you some pictures.

As Tyler says at ZeroHedge;

the US economy, as represented by its Balance of Payments, the profligacy of the US consumer, the massive expansion of consumer leverage, and the collapse in US manufacturing jobs, and specifically its current near-terminal state, is as much as legacy of the baby boom generation's actions (and lack thereof), as of everything else that has already been mulled over and scapegoated an infinite number of times in both the mainstream and fringe media.

Click for larger.


Economic ped0phi1ia - satisfying your own selfish needs on the back of children.

Hat tip Andrew.

Generational Warfare

Ya'll know I like to tweak the Boomers, and have a lot of faith in the younger generation.

Though the bell curve is wide, generations do have personalities and points of views.

I'm a Gen X type - so I found this description by our buddy over at BroadsideBlog very interesting, and right on target.

If you are a boomer, here is how you see them (condensed from “10 characteristics of Generation Me” by Gary Schlee, based on a book by Kathleen Shaputis):

Direct to the point of being rude
Lacking self-esteem
Sense of entitlement
Thin skinned
Dreamers
Cynical
Professional students (living at home)

If you are in Generation Y, you see yourself this way (from “Generation Y” by Sally Kane):

Tech-Savvy
Family-Centric
Achievement-Oriented
Team-Oriented
Attention-Craving (wanting feedback, guidance, mentoring)

He doesn't cover Gen X, but a decade ago at ScienceBlog, this works.

Generation Xers -- those born between 1965 and 1984 -- are tormented by anxiety, fear of failure and a lack of control over the forces that affect their lives. To cope, many have adopted "chameleon" personalities, pretending to be what others want them to be, but at great emotional cost to themselves,
...
In Masks and Mirrors: Generation X and the Chameleon Personality (Praeger, 2001), Bernard Carl Rosen, professor emeritus of sociology at Cornell, asserts that elite Generation X'ers are at the forefront of the technology revolution but are filled with anger at the preceding generation -- the baby boomers -- who, they feel, takes advantage of them.

To the frazzled, elite X'ers, who feel under intense pressure in a fiercely competitive society, the glue that keeps society together looks weak and the social system feels wobbly.

"To cope with their anxieties and fears, many X'ers have decided that fighting is useless, submission intolerable and escape impossible. Thus, they choose pretending -- that is, they become chameleons as their only chance for protection," says Rosen, a socio-psychologist. "This practice, however, of pleasing whomever they are with, is ultimately self-defeating." Over time, "chameleonism," becomes permanent, Rosen says.

About right, but Chameleon? No .... Salamander.

Hat tip Lucien.

Walter Russell Mead goes Salamander on Boomers

Like I tell you all the time - read CDRSalamander every day and you will be years ahead of your peers.

Walter - I think you nailed it.

In every field of American life, there are Boomers who have made and are making important, selfless contributions: in hospitals, in classrooms, in government, in business, in the military. You name it and we are there.

But at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

The Spanish Canary

You don't have to be a futurist to see the future. Unless we get the right leadership - we are just 5 years from Spain ... and not the good parts.

He depends on government handouts of €530 ($702) a month – less than half the amount he needs just to pay his mortgage – and is convinced that the bank is about to repossess the flat where he lives with his wife and three children.

“I am legalised here, but for more than five years I’ve not been working,” says Mr Ekenobaye. “We are trying to do whatever we can.”
...
“In the past four years we have lost 25 per cent of our income,” says José María Fraile, the town’s mayor. “At the moment there’s no liquidity ... The [credit] window has closed.”

Mr Fraile is negotiating with trade unions to fire 190 people, a quarter of the city’s workforce, as a way to save money. One private company responsible for sports facilities has obtained a court order to sequester municipal assets to cover millions of euros of unpaid debts. Valoriza, another company, is owed €80m for years of garbage collection and cleaning.

It's only starting, and it's coming here.

We know about Detroit - but what about States? The first shoe to drop in the USA is already going; California.

“This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years,” says Crane later. “Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs.” Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education—that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.

... I see it in my own town, the taxpayers have become slaves to the public employee retirees - fat boomers tooling around in their Harleys.

"It’s like the housing bubble and the Internet bubble. There were people around who were writing about it. It’s not that there aren’t people telling us that this is crazy. It’s that you refuse to believe that you are crazy.”

He hands me a chart. It shows that the city’s pension costs when he first became interested in the subject were projected to run $73 million a year. This year they would be $245 million: pension and health-care costs of retired workers now are more than half the budget. In three years’ time pension costs alone would come to $400 million, though “if you were to adjust for real life expectancy it is more like $650 million.” Legally obliged to meet these costs, the city can respond only by cutting elsewhere. As a result, San Jose, once run by 7,450 city workers, was now being run by 5,400 city workers. The city was back to staffing levels of 1988, when it had a quarter of a million fewer residents. The remaining workers had taken a 10 percent pay cut; yet even that was not enough to offset the increase in the city’s pension liability. The city had closed its libraries three days a week. It had cut back servicing its parks. It had refrained from opening a brand-new community center, built before the housing bust, because it couldn’t pay to staff the place. For the first time in history it had laid off police officers and firefighters.

By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions.
...
I n August 2011, the same week that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of the United States government, a judge approved the bankruptcy plan for Vallejo, California. Vallejo’s creditors ended up with 5 cents on the dollar, public employees with something like 20 and 30 cents on the dollar. The city no longer received any rating at all from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

California did not get there by accident. Their bad idea voters, after they soiled their next - have moved.

“Those who have money and can move do so,” Whitney wrote in her report to her Wall Street clients, “those without money and who cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance. It becomes effectively a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ ”

Behold the nation the Boomers have left their children. California dreaming to a nightmare in a generation - all because of their greed. Is that fair? All I know is that the nation that inherited literally and figuratively the most from their parents are, literally, leaving their children the least. I guess they figured that instead of parenting their children, they medicated them enough that they won't care.

Do the math.