Reprinted from August of 2011, when the Ryan Plan was news. Has much changed?
You boomers are in trouble. Your parents lived through the depression or were directly impacted by it, and they came up with a whole circus of social safety nets. This system was never built to last even if it had not been abused, but it has been ransacked. They used it as intended, and you have abused it, hollowing out the programs while expanding them, so that all that remains is a system of empty shells. Now you want to retire on it, and there’s nothing left. So you’ve borrowed the money from overseas, and told them that my generations will pay for it.
Well maybe we will, and maybe we won’t.
It’s not going to be there for us, and it may not even be there for you. Plan A was the original pyramid (at best) or Ponzi scheme, which has clearly run out of rope. Plan B has been discussed for decades, and finally offered as the Paul Ryan plan. In Plan B, we close the system down gracefully by allowing you all to ride out as you expected, if you will just get out of our way in our attempts to fund our own receding retirements. You have unwisely resisted.
Plan C is you can shiver hungry in the dark for all I care, and the programs will simply be axed the moment we get half plus one across the board in Washington, D.C. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to realize that your parents have sold you into slavery. The greatest generation saved the world from totalitarian domination. Your lot wondered why they bothered.
I urge you to take Plan B while it is still on the table. No group of people has ever been made so generous an offer by a group with as much dispositive power as my generation has over you. As much as I would find Plan C distasteful, the fact is you are oppressing my generation with decades of austerity so that you do not have to face the hard reality that you assign to me. You have consumed the greatness of this country while borrowing against it. Now the only collateral left is my generation, which I assure you, will not be sold. I will turn your sorry carcass out of doors in a heartbeat if we cannot find a better way out of this. And rest assured, we will find a way out, one way or another.
So think it over, but don’t dawdle. As you boomers used to say: Ti-i-ime is on my side
Beloved Admin: As long as we’re here and not ‘elsewhere’, I feel safe in admitting my admiration for Mr. Ryan’s taking up a thankless task with tenacity and grace. As well, I have to ‘fess up to thinking highly of his mentor, Jack Kemp…(If you want to throw things, please make them Nerf-like.)
I agree with every word you repost here, by the way. Inaction has consequences…
This is close, but not totally correct. The original betrayal was in the 30’s, when all this was loosed upon the world. But since TR the “movement” has been growing and eating the heart out of the nation. The “greatest generation” only deposed ONE set of tyrants – to replace them with yet another. Had they the fortitude to persevere we would have been rid of the Soviets AND their hateful ideology – and hopefully in the process trashed out all the “reasoning” behind such wonderful moves as Johnson’s Great Society.
Note ALL these moves have been to the backdrop of wholly illegal acts. Acts that the USSC was totally complicit in. Such is the status of Rule of Law, a much quoted myth as it applies to today’s conditions.
One other thing to consider. SS was paid for by the baby boomers for most of their lives. It was not an “option”. That money, which you rightfully now wish to see migrated over to some kind of private organization, was always the plaything of the politicians and the ruling elite. But they hardly comprise the majority of the baby boomers.
The other issue, which is harder to approach, is that the government has created a sense that if you have an problem or issue, it will take care of you. “Safety nets” are not suppose to be anything more than tiding over for a very brief period. But that’s not what we have. IF you breed a society where no one has an expectation that their children will be involved in their later care, AND having those children will be costly without any income from them to the family (as was true in days of old) then you can fully expect to see a contracting populace who expects to be cared for in their old age.
Yet another unintended consequence of the destruction of our culture and family environment by the Left.
Not to mention the linking of SS and Medicare in 1996, by WJC; and the lack of means-testing for either: DYN-O-MITE! as some Boomers might have said…Are we at the “spend more on entitlements than on defense” place, yet?