← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Centinel
Thread ID: 12594 | Posts: 13 | Started: 2004-03-01
2004-03-01 11:03 | User Profile
From Creators Syndicate, Inc. [url]http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37362[/url]
Greenspan's grim diagnosis
By Patrick J. Buchanan March 1, 2004
The job of the chairman of the Fed, it used to be said, was to take away the punch bowl just as the party got going good.
Last week, Alan Greenspan did his duty. He told Congress Social Security benefits must be cut for the baby boomers, to avoid taxes having to be raised on the Gen-Xers. Like Thelma and Louise, Social Security and Medicare are headed for the cliff.
For decades, our leaders, terrified of touching the "third rail" of American politics, have put off addressing the long-term crisis. Now, the monster has come into view.
In 2008, the first of the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in U.S. history, reaches 62 and eligibility for early retirement. By 2012, all boomers born in that first postwar year of 1946 reach full retirement age. Then, the wave will crest and crash.
From 2012 to 2031, all 77 million boomers will reach 67 and retire. Today's big contributors to the Medicare and Social Security will become tomorrow's biggest consumers of the trust fund money.
And the young folks entering the labor force as the boomers depart, more heavily minority and immigrant, will be unable to match the tax contributions of the boomers. As the man with the sandwich board in Times Square used to say, "Repent, the end is near."
Soon, the surpluses in Medicare and Social Security will start to shrink. Then, they will vanish ââ¬â unless benefit cuts are made or higher taxes imposed. The longer we wait to have the surgery done, the more painful and politically lethal it will be.
And as the surpluses in the trust funds disappear, the enormity of the fiscal deficit they have masked will be exposed. Then we shall no longer see as through a glass darkly the criminal indifference of this generation of Americans toward its children.
But Greenspan only touched on the emerging fiscal crisis.
The Bush prescription drug plan, costed out at $400 billion last fall, is now estimated to cost $540 billion. If Kerry replaces Bush, Democrats will make that program more generous and move toward universal health coverage. We are talking hundreds of billions more here.
This year's deficit is already estimated at $521 billion, before the cost of Iraq is factored in. Unless the economy grows more rapidly, and more jobs are created, the deficit could break the peacetime record of 6 percent of GDP. And this is only the beginning of the bad news.
The merchandise trade deficit last year hit $550 billion. With the dollar sinking and the cost of oil and imports rising, that deficit, too, may soar. But if the dollar continues its fall, overseas investors in Treasury bonds and U.S. securities with fixed returns could dump these wasting assets.
This would force the Fed to raise interest rates to finance the deficit and prevent a run on the dollar. Interest on the U.S. national debt, one of the few budget bright spots, could soar again, adding scores of billions to future deficits.
Greenspan had other good news. There are two giant icebergs out there. Fannie May and Freddie Mac, "government sponsored enterprises" that hold three-fourths of all single-family-home mortgages, pose a "systemic risk." Since between them they stand behind $4 trillion in mortgages, shakiness here could make the S & L disaster look a bookkeeping error.
Behind America's fiscal crisis lies a social crisis, bred of the fact that the baby boomers are not the people their parents were.
Many came from big families but chose not have big families ââ¬â to put off marriage, have fewer children and live the good life. Now, they are entering the autumn of their lives. But the next generation is smaller, less affluent. And because it contains more minority and immigrant poor, the new generation is less able to earn the incomes to provide the taxes to support the benefits the baby boomers expect in their golden years.
Generational conflict looms, and another problem. As we approach this decade's end, the baby boomers who have been pouring scores of billions annually into pension plans, propelling the bull markets of the 1980s and 1990s, will begin to take out and draw down these funds.
How will that affect the Dow and the Nasdaq?
Europe, whose native-born are dying faster than ours, and whose health and pension benefits are more generous, are solving their problems three ways. Taking in millions of Muslim immigrants, painfully paring back their welfare states and free-riding on U.S. defense. If we do not bring the present and looming deficits down, we are headed the same way.
Prediction: The American empire will be the first luxury to be auctioned off in the great yard sale to save Social Security and Medicare.
2004-03-02 05:44 | User Profile
More on the Federal Reserve:
[url]http://wsi.matriots.com/StockMarketCrash.html[/url]
2004-03-02 16:39 | User Profile
[QUOTE]And the young folks entering the labor force as the boomers depart, more heavily minority and immigrant, will be unable to match the tax contributions of the boomers. As the man with the sandwich board in Times Square used to say, "Repent, the end is near." [/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Generational conflict looms, and another problem. As we approach this decade's end, the baby boomers who have been pouring scores of billions annually into pension plans, propelling the bull markets of the 1980s and 1990s, will begin to take out and draw down these funds. [/QUOTE]
PJB didn't expressly tie those two points together. Because Boomers chose not to have enough children to finance their retirements in our de facto pay-as-you-go system, they had to import young and non-white hired help. So not only will the conflict be "generational" it will also be ethnic. It's hard to imagine that some cholo sweating his a$$ off picking lettuce will agree to a steep rise in SSN to finance some old white guy's retirement. This really could get ugly.
Which is where we come in.
[QUOTE]Soon, the surpluses in Medicare and Social Security will start to shrink. Then, they will vanish ââ¬â unless benefit cuts are made or higher taxes imposed. The longer we wait to have the surgery done, the more painful and politically lethal it will be. [/QUOTE]
This is misleading, and PJB should know better. There is no money in the trust funds - it's all just intragovernmental paper. IOU's from the Treasury to be financed by income and other taxes.
[QUOTE]And as the surpluses in the trust funds disappear, the enormity of the fiscal deficit they have masked will be exposed. [/QUOTE]
That is very nearly a lie, Pat. There is no money in the trust funds, and you know it. I think that PJB pulled his punch on this one a bit too well.
[QUOTE]Then we shall no longer see as through a glass darkly the criminal indifference of this generation of Americans toward its children. [/QUOTE]
True, but how does that stack up to the murder of 35 million and counting Americans through abortion? What can one expect from such people?
[QUOTE]But Greenspan only touched on the emerging fiscal crisis. The Bush prescription drug plan, costed out at $400 billion last fall, is now estimated to cost $540 billion. If Kerry replaces Bush, Democrats will make that program more generous and move toward universal health coverage. We are talking hundreds of billions more here. [/QUOTE]
And it's only going to get worse. The Boomers won't want to hear it and they'll vote themselves huge increases in old age pensions, trying to stick the bill to Pedro. Ain't gonna fly.
[QUOTE]This year's deficit is already estimated at $521 billion, before the cost of Iraq is factored in. Unless the economy grows more rapidly, and more jobs are created, the deficit could break the peacetime record of 6 percent of GDP. And this is only the beginning of the bad news.
The merchandise trade deficit last year hit $550 billion. With the dollar sinking and the cost of oil and imports rising, that deficit, too, may soar. But if the dollar continues its fall, overseas investors in Treasury bonds and U.S. securities with fixed returns could dump these wasting assets. [/QUOTE]
I wish somebody would talk about why those two figures are so similar.
[QUOTE]This would force the Fed to raise interest rates to finance the deficit and prevent a run on the dollar. Interest on the U.S. national debt, one of the few budget bright spots, could soar again, adding scores of billions to future deficits. [/QUOTE]
It's gonna happen. I wish I knew when. Get out of greenbacks.
[QUOTE]Greenspan had other good news. There are two giant icebergs out there. Fannie May and Freddie Mac, "government sponsored enterprises" that hold three-fourths of all single-family-home mortgages, pose a "systemic risk." Since between them they stand behind $4 trillion in mortgages, shakiness here could make the S & L disaster look a bookkeeping error. [/QUOTE]
PJB didn't mention the high level of personal debt that is bound to pop at some point.
[QUOTE]How will that affect the Dow and the Nasdaq? [/QUOTE]
They're going down to triple digits, both of them.
[QUOTE]Prediction: The American empire will be the first luxury to be auctioned off in the great yard sale to save Social Security and Medicare.[/QUOTE]
I agree, but as AY points out, Hymen ain't gonna like it.
PJB also failed to mention in this article the astonishing amount a certain sh*tty little country costs us, as documented by Ron Paul and others.
So, for the Boomers it's either their old age pensions or Israel, without putting too fine a point to it. It sure seems to me that conflict is inevitable.
Walter
2004-03-02 17:12 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]PJB didn't expressly tie those two points together. Because Boomers chose not to have enough children to finance their retirements in our de facto pay-as-you-go system, they had to import young and non-white hired help. So not only will the conflict be "generational" it will also be ethnic. It's hard to imagine that some cholo sweating his a$$ off picking lettuce will agree to a steep rise in SSN to finance some old white guy's retirement. This really could get ugly.
True, but how does that stack up to the murder of 35 million and counting Americans through abortion? What can one expect from such people?
And it's only going to get worse. The Boomers won't want to hear it and they'll vote themselves huge increases in old age pensions, trying to stick the bill to Pedro. Ain't gonna fly. [/QUOTE]Irony of aborting a large portion of the younger generation, and then importing unsympathetic foreigners to pay for SSN. Picture some Baby Boomer in a retirement home being assaulted and robbed by the hired Mexican help, whilst his children and grandchildren (if he has any) wait for him to die to collect what little he has saved over the years, since they can't manage to save enough themselves to ever pull themselves up out from under the national and their own personal debt.
2004-03-02 19:53 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]PJB didn't expressly tie those two points together. Because Boomers chose not to have enough children to finance their retirements in our de facto pay-as-you-go system, they had to import young and non-white hired help... [/QUOTE]
Much wrong in a small space.
Boomers' lack of issue was not a choice. Starting in the mid-seventies (the time during & after boomers got old enough to work, at least the younger cohorts) it became impossible to raise kids on one paycheck. Plus the corporate downsizing and off-shoring affected early-to-mid-career boomers far more than any other generation. We bore the brunt of policies made well before our time.
"They" also didn't import "non-white hired help" Corporate managers, goverment lawyers and Zio-Christian nabobs did all that. All of this began during the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, when even young boomers had no influence on public policy whatsoever.
Working-class boomers read this sort of thing and nearly retch. It's the elites of several generations that crafted these policies. Putting the blame in the wrong place does no good and much harm; the elites love it when we suspect each other and not them.
2004-03-04 19:27 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ragnar]Much wrong in a small space.
Boomers' lack of issue was not a choice. Starting in the mid-seventies (the time during & after boomers got old enough to work, at least the younger cohorts) it became impossible to raise kids on one paycheck. Plus the corporate downsizing and off-shoring affected early-to-mid-career boomers far more than any other generation. We bore the brunt of policies made well before our time.
"They" also didn't import "non-white hired help" Corporate managers, goverment lawyers and Zio-Christian nabobs did all that. All of this began during the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, when even young boomers had no influence on public policy whatsoever.
Working-class boomers read this sort of thing and nearly retch. It's the elites of several generations that crafted these policies. Putting the blame in the wrong place does no good and much harm; the elites love it when we suspect each other and not them.[/QUOTE]
You're being way too generous, Ragnar.
Maybe the Boomers didn't INVENT most of the bad stuff, but they certainly INSTITUTIONALIZED it. C'mon. These folks are approaching retirement, for Pete's sake. When do they grow up and take responsibility for what's going on?
White Boomer wymyn gave us big McMansions built for kids they never had. Ditto for abortion on demand. Heck, they turned it into a sort of sacrament. Which generation gave us untold numbers of kids physchologically damaged through neglect and brain damaged through liberal use of Ritalin?
Nobody forced white wymyn to seek self-actualization through divorce and career. Nobody forced working class whites of either sex to swill cheap beer and zone out in front of the boob tube 40-plus hours every week. Nobody forced them to vote for politicians who institutionalized socialist programs. Nobody coerced them into abandoning their trade unions, accepting meekly the destruction of their neighborhoods and the importation of millions of cheap third world replacement workers. Nobody forced them to abandon their religion and spit on their traditions. Nobody put their titties in a vice and forced them to achieve an astonishly studied ignorance of history, geography and politics.
Hey, if it wasn't their fault, why do I get shouted down whenever I talk about this stuff to my working class Cheesehead high school chums? They're getting the royal screw and they cheer it on! They don't like racism (gasp!). They're mostly "Judeo-Christians" who lead lives filled with adultery, drunkeness, refeer (and a snort or two of cocaine on payday), professional sports, dart tournaments and beer, and bowling leagues and beer. They talk about reality shows in bars. Few of the guys I grew up with read books, hardly any have ever had any intellectual life at all. They spout whatever the latest line is on the boob tube.
I really don't know where you're seeing their good intentions, I really don't.
I see very little to admire, and nothing to pity.
Sure the elites offerred this to them, but they accepted the offer. What's their part in this? Or don't they even have a part in this? Is an entire generation of Americans to join the ranks of the helpless victims that we're all supposed to pity?
Admit it, Ragnar. They want this. They want Big Brother.
In my very humble opinion, this must be the starting point of all further reflection. Americans are a pathetic bunch, for the most part. They embraced this Culture of Critique thing they were offerred by the elites, it wasn't forced on them. And now they're weak and oooooo so vewy vulewable and they need to be ruled.
No, that's not it. They WANT - they LONG - to be ruled.
And they'll get what they want, one way or the other.
The only question is who will rule them. We know who's ruling them now, and it ain't us.
I respectfully urge you to reconsider this optimistic - and I dare say pollyannish - assessment of the sheeple. Give that one up, my friend. The great majority of Americans are defiantly ignorant and morally (and financially) bankrupt.
Walter
2004-07-04 18:13 | User Profile
Howdy, I like gay people, generally, as much as straights...
I agree with yours above there, it's accurate. Or should I say "fabulous". Ragnar's cool, it's just that he projects his own heroic self from days gone by, but yet present, thankfully for us, (in himself), onto his peers. He even has admirably, the quality and instinct toward loyalty. I do too. I wuv Ragnar, and I'm even 'straight' believe it or not. I'm so PROUD, if gay... I'd SHOUT it to the world, and be sure to use protective things.
It's also cyclical... in 'acceptance' sometimes we Must, (not always, when there can be the exercise of will), view our world: mother Nature, under God as a Garden. SOMETIMES plain and simple it's cyclical... based on the masses, i.e. being--(regrettably to us)--just themselves, the Masses... (help, Mr. Wizard) because She needs them... out of which to create a few of us.
Maybe you wouldn't include me in that...no problem... I'd never want to belong to a club that would have me or Woody Allen for a member.
2004-07-05 14:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]You're being way too generous, Ragnar.
Maybe the Boomers didn't INVENT most of the bad stuff, but they certainly INSTITUTIONALIZED it. C'mon. These folks are approaching retirement, for Pete's sake. When do they grow up and take responsibility for what's going on?
White Boomer wymyn gave us big McMansions built for kids they never had. Ditto for abortion on demand. Heck, they turned it into a sort of sacrament. Which generation gave us untold numbers of kids physchologically damaged through neglect and brain damaged through liberal use of Ritalin?
Nobody forced white wymyn to seek self-actualization through divorce and career. Nobody forced working class whites of either sex to swill cheap beer and zone out in front of the boob tube 40-plus hours every week. Nobody forced them to vote for politicians who institutionalized socialist programs. Nobody coerced them into abandoning their trade unions, accepting meekly the destruction of their neighborhoods and the importation of millions of cheap third world replacement workers. Nobody forced them to abandon their religion and spit on their traditions. Nobody put their titties in a vice and forced them to achieve an astonishly studied ignorance of history, geography and politics.
Hey, if it wasn't their fault, why do I get shouted down whenever I talk about this stuff to my working class Cheesehead high school chums? They're getting the royal screw and they cheer it on! They don't like racism (gasp!). They're mostly "Judeo-Christians" who lead lives filled with adultery, drunkeness, refeer (and a snort or two of cocaine on payday), professional sports, dart tournaments and beer, and bowling leagues and beer. They talk about reality shows in bars. Few of the guys I grew up with read books, hardly any have ever had any intellectual life at all. They spout whatever the latest line is on the boob tube.
I really don't know where you're seeing their good intentions, I really don't.
I see very little to admire, and nothing to pity.
Sure the elites offerred this to them, but they accepted the offer. What's their part in this? Or don't they even have a part in this? Is an entire generation of Americans to join the ranks of the helpless victims that we're all supposed to pity?
Admit it, Ragnar. They want this. They want Big Brother.
In my very humble opinion, this must be the starting point of all further reflection. Americans are a pathetic bunch, for the most part. They embraced this Culture of Critique thing they were offerred by the elites, it wasn't forced on them. And now they're weak and oooooo so vewy vulewable and they need to be ruled.
No, that's not it. They WANT - they LONG - to be ruled.
And they'll get what they want, one way or the other.
The only question is who will rule them. We know who's ruling them now, and it ain't us.
I respectfully urge you to reconsider this optimistic - and I dare say pollyannish - assessment of the sheeple. Give that one up, my friend. The great majority of Americans are defiantly ignorant and morally (and financially) bankrupt.
Walter[/QUOTE]
I really do have to go along with Walter on this one in a big, big way. Very nicely put.
2004-07-06 15:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Spiderman]Howdy, I like gay people, generally, as much as straights...
I.[/QUOTE]
LOL!!
I'm not gay, duyde.
That's a leftover from my last avatar (dancing gay spiderman) that didn't go over well with the regulars around here.
I'd better fix that, and soon.
2004-07-07 20:24 | User Profile
[url]http://www.etherzone.com/2004/henr070704.shtml[/url]
2004-07-08 05:32 | User Profile
With the best of intentions, I expected this wretched, wretched subject to rot on the vine. [B]Spiderman[/B] chose to be a nuclear force and revive it. Thus again I must correct the estimable (but a bit misguided) Walter on the gory details of who did what to whom and when.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] Maybe the Boomers didn't INVENT most of the bad stuff, but they certainly INSTITUTIONALIZED it. C'mon. These folks are approaching retirement, for Pete's sake. When do they grow up and take responsibility for what's going on? [/QUOTE]
The Bush Reich hasn't announced this yet, but millions of them (us) are never going to retire, having been down sized too often.
Nor did we institutionalize anything. Levittown and McGarbage, Rosie the Riveter and abortion were up and running when we got to the party.
The Greatest Generation did all that... including, by the way, the greatest act of treason to the "original intent" of the Constitution which to this day remains obscure to most of the country.
America was divided into industrial zones during WWII and this was kept, modified and turned into Federal Districts by Nixon (Greatest Generationer) when he was the president.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] White Boomer wymyn gave us big McMansions built for kids they never had. Ditto for abortion on demand. Heck, they turned it into a sort of sacrament. Which generation gave us untold numbers of kids physchologically damaged through neglect and brain damaged through liberal use of Ritalin?[/QUOTE]
I would find it satisfying to blame them too, but it is false. The corporations and the CIA created feminism in the fifties to create more consumers and let the Steinems and the Abzugs spin theories to pull it off. In no way was feminism a boomer production. Older, more devious minds had their paws in that from before day one.
This one you can prove: You can check opinion polls on this because it's true: It took over thirty years of full-time media propaganda (all from pre-WWII consortiums) to [B]finally[/B] get working-class white women to see "jobs as more important than husbands" but it was only after 1999 that it happened.
(I'm assuming all of us remember or heard of how hostile working class gals were to feminism when it first came on, no? If not, I'm half tempted to let my other half post the explanation. Then again, maybe not. To this day my dear (working-class) wife refers to her upper-class elite-educated non-sisters as "c*nts". But then she earned her opinion the hard way, she dealt with these wymyn up close.)
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] Hey, if it wasn't their fault, why do I get shouted down whenever I talk about this stuff to my working class Cheesehead high school chums? They're getting the royal screw and they cheer it on! [/QUOTE]
Get better chums.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] Sure the elites offerred this to them, but they accepted the offer. What's their part in this? Or don't they even have a part in this? Is an entire generation of Americans to join the ranks of the helpless victims that we're all supposed to pity?[/QUOTE]
They were given Hobson's choice, not an "offer". And quite a few I knew DID attempt to find alternatives. I've known conservative communards who tried to leave consumer society. I've been a survivalist. In the end, the corporate template, laid down in the gilded age of the 1880s or so, won out.
And that culture says everyone has a price. Turned out true. But one generation just hands it to another, unexamined.
Blame one link in a chain if you like. But if the WWII generation had skipped us and everyone else up to Generation Y, the scene would stay the same.
It's Taylorism, man. Older than all of us. "Once upon a time the system serves the people but now the people serve the system." Planned out before WWII and still on schedule.
It was made so you could blame everyone and no one and always be right.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]
I respectfully urge you to reconsider this optimistic - and I dare say pollyannish - assessment of the sheeple. Give that one up, my friend. The great majority of Americans are defiantly ignorant and morally (and financially) bankrupt.
[/QUOTE]
These bankrupt souls might yet be the Jacobins a nos jours. And worse: They will be Jacobins who are right to be Jacobins.
I saw it in an odd place: An all-white audience packed watching Farenheit 911. A suburban crowd, not where the lady and I usually wind up. But they were there, hissing Bush's every scene, the ladies especially like so many modern Madam Defarges.
They might be waking up. Not too soon to consider that possibility, my friend.
2004-07-10 10:10 | User Profile
[QUOTE]These bankrupt souls might yet be the Jacobins a nos jours. And worse: They will be Jacobins who are right to be Jacobins.[/QUOTE]
Very ably argued, Ragnar. As usual.
I guess it comes down to a judgement call. You see much, much more in the average white American than I. I think you're way far too optimistic in your assessment, but I'll tell you one thing, nobody will be happier than I if your view proves true.
Ragnar, if these fat-assed, beer swilling, NFL-watching morons will rise up in a Jacobin revolt, I'll buy you a barrell of your favourite beer and sing "Whiskey in the Jar" (or other Irish drinking song of your choice) at the location of your choosing.
Deal?
Walter
2004-07-11 16:53 | User Profile
Yikes, I'm "torn"... what even if straight, one wuvs Yannis & Rag-head? Torn between two intellectual wuvers... feeling like a whore... wuving both of you, is such an easy chore...
I think I'll become a politician, I seem to love the Fence... good Fences (for stolen goods-?-no as in sitting on walls) good neighbors make... wow, I can see over there... and, over there... Hmmm... I like over here... ok the "I'sss" meaning Me... have it... I kid, it's a menage a trois... (feeling like a whore)...