NL makes an emotional appeal in defense of Social Security:
You said, “What it cannot afford to do is to permit them to increase while simultaneously spending more on…. massive income transfers to the elderly, the poor and other unproductive classes. “
HOW DARE you say this about the “elderly”. The generations like your ma and pa that worked hard all their lives to get us what we have TODAY. They are OWED their retirement and to have a decent live after.
WE OWE our parents everything for all the blessings we have today. Most just live on a moderate pension and Social Security. As for the poor, I hope you are NOT talking about the widows and the fatherless. (No, not the abandoning kind.) As a Christian you know you are breaking “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth”? If you feel they should not have their monies and call them “unproductive”.
This prodigiously stupid response to my WND column yesterday is, alas, a fairly typical one. The Baby Boomers, as is their narcissistic wont, are clearly in complete denial about the mathematically inevitable consequences of the grand Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They don’t seem to grasp that the large numbers that made them such a cultural force from the 1960s onward now renders them a vast financial anchor on the nation that will inevitably have to be cut loose in some manner. Like a vast plague of locusts, they devoured the nation’s harvest and its seed corn.
If the collective “ma and pa” had worked hard all their lives rather than borrowing money to live beyond their means, there wouldn’t be any need for this melodrama. But they didn’t. They spent everything they earned, they spent everything their children will earn, and they spent everything their grandchildren will earn… assuming they weren’t among the millions of women who murdered their children and eliminated future generations post-1973. The elderly of America not only don’t deserve much in the way of respect, they will be extremely fortunate if they are not forcibly exiled to metaphorical ice floes for their inter-generational financial crimes. They not only ransacked the present, they raped the future.
The elderly are presently the wealthiest segment of the nation. Extracting more wealth from the young and transferring to the irresponsible elderly is not only a mockery of justice, it is rubbing salt in the wound. And one does not honor one’s father or mother by robbing from someone else and presenting one’s aged parent with the proceeds of one’s crimes. But it should not surprise us that an aging Baby Boomer would attempt to turn theft into a Biblical injunction.
Not every Baby Boomer is responsible for the crimes of his generation, just as every National Socialist wasn’t responsible for the crimes of the SS-Totenkopfverbände. But that doesn’t make the crimes, or the inevitable consequences of those crimes, disappear.