Intergenerational Equity

Presidential Candidates need to make "inter-generational equity" a top priority, says US Comptroller General David Walker, comparing the current government situation, bankrupting the future, to the Fall of Rome in the Financial Times.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path."...

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity one of their top priorities. If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t, I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

Learning from Mistakes

is not a Boomer trait apparently... So maybe they will bring back the draft that they all had such a good time agreeing about back in the glory days of the late 60s and early 70s.

They haven't raised a healthy group of civic-minded Millenials, all full of self-esteem, duty, and groupthink for nothing.

A group of political leaders with visions of utopian transformation worldwide, a generation of children who have been educated into historic and philosophical illiteracy, and diversity-trained into a saccarine group ideology of never ever committing the evil crime of exercising their judgement. Mix, stir, add a little FEAR for flavor. Viola! Fascism!

STEALING FROM THE FUTURE

STEALING FROM THE FUTURE is a sub-title from the article "Another Reason For Those Empty Houses" in Businessweek about the current "Real Estate Crisis".
Stealing from the future? But I always heard that the future is now. And since the future is now and we are apparently stealing the future, does that mean that we are stealing the present? Who controls the present controls the future, so the thieves have the present and the future... No wonder I live in the past...

Sacred Cow Slayer

It was thought that one of the advantages that Boomers brought to society was the slaying of sacred cows, "questioning authority" (until they become the authority). It was hoped that by discarding the artificial constructs of their elders they could get to some sort of essential ordering of society.

But the Boomers, as Visionaries, as Idealists, impose their own contrived visions upon us. For example, Republicans want to legislate everyone into heaven, and Democrats want to legislate heaven on earth.

Growing up in the ideological, moral and emotional chaos in the wake of the Boomers, Generation X has developed a very practical way of life, not seeking to cure the world of its ills but seeking to take care of the immediate problems around them. Boomers have concerts to raise awareness to stop world hunger, Xers go to the neighborhood soup kitchen.

But in their very practicality Xers are the more serious and dangerous (for Boomer idealogues) Sacred Cow Slayers. Thomas Woods is one of the most prolific and articulate of these. As the reviwer in The American Thinker describes him and his work:

[W]hen you stumble upon an objective historian, with pronounced analytical skills, who can write with clarity, panache, and precision then the "good American" must read his work. One such historian is Tom Woods.

Woods' books include The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and now 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed To Ask. Here's a good Cow Slaying Quote from the Introduction:

This book...poses 33 questions about American historyfor which the typical answers are either misleading, grossly unsatisfactory, or clearly and demonstrably wrong. Worse than the standard answers to these questions is that many of them are simply never raised in the first place, since they may give rise to forbidden thoughts that run counter to established opinion.

As the review in The American Thinker continues:

Tom Woods's book will disabuse those Americans who are naïve enough to think that they live under the protections guaranteed in the old Constitution. Those protections are long gone, replaced by a pernicious democratic socialism that more closely reflects the dystopian horror of George Orwell rather then the federated republic of George Washington.

Pragmatic Revolution, Gen X Style

From the Right Angle at Human Events: a great piece on generational differences between Boomers and Gen Xers. Two great quotes from the article:

My parent’s generation had grand visions of communal living and transcendental experiences. My generation embraces mass produced consumer goods and free trade economics. Remaking the world is not on our agenda. No, our anger is rooted in pragmatism. Our money is being taken from us to fuel entitlement programs that many of us expect to be bankrupted by the time we need them.

We want the ‘baby boom’ generation to stop sleeping at the wheel because it is our generation that is the roadside crew cleaning up the mess their idiocy is leaving behind.

If the Boomers are like the previous Idealist Generation, Xers are like the previous Reactive Generation, those youth of the Roaring 20s cynical of Wilsonian Idealism called the Lost Generation, the F. Scott Fitzgerald generation, who became the practical leaders through WWII -Patton, Ike, Bradley etc.