You have to watch this video to see how insidiously the Villagers are spreading the narrative: Those Baby Boomers are sucking all the money out of the Treasury because they’re just so damned selfish! And only some of them served in Viet Nam! Watch as Diane Sawyer puts on her Very Serious Face and says the deficit is a big problem. Pay attention to the lies scattered throughout. Dear God, it’s going to be another one of those years:
The first baby boomers will turn 65 Jan. 1, beginning a flood of applications for Medicare benefits that experts fear could drain the economy and hold political repercussions for President Obama.
The baby boomer generation marked a huge reproductive uptick between 1946 and 1964, when 76 million children were born, creating a higher demand across the nation for schools and consumer products, and an upheaval in popular culture.
But this post-World War II generation’s overwhelming demand on the Medicare system could possibly leave future generations with a bigger bill.
Medicare currently covers 46 million people, costing the government about $500 billion a year. But when the last of the iconic generation reaches 65 in about 20 years, more than 80 million people will be eligible for Medicare coverage, although the number of working people paying into the program will have decreased from 3.5 per person receiving benefits to 2.3.
The increase in the number of people eligible for benefits paired with the rising costs of health care and longer life spans threatens the program’s sustainability. It could force the administration and Congress to come up with a plan to reduce costs, either by cutting benefits or raising taxes.
A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that 61 percent of Americans favored raising taxes in lieu of slashing benefits. The poll included adults in their 20s, who potentially could end up paying more into the system.
Fifty-one percent opposed the idea of giving older Americans a fixed payment to use against the cost of private insurance, an option made popular by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Sixty-three percent opposed raising the age of eligibility.
How stubbornly ill-formed these voters are. How are we going to reeducate them?
Sawyer was born in December 1945. The baby boom is said to have started in 1946, so she missed being a boomer herself by just months. Maybe it’s time she retired.
Look. Back in Reagan time they figured out that there needed to be more money to cover the Boomers. We raised the FICA tax; we paid the money. We put the money in the bank like frugal, gratification deferring people are supposed to do.
Now we need the money and we are going to the bank with our withdrawal slips and they tell us they don’t have it. They tell us it would be a hardship on them to pay it back, and they blame us for being SELFISH for insisting on it.
I guess it makes a certain amount of sense because the original idea was to raise the tax so high that it would crush the middle class and they would demand that Social Security be abolished. Unfortunately for them we did not crush. Now the reckoning is to be made. But we have nobody on our side.
Fifty-one percent opposed the idea of giving older Americans a fixed payment to use against the cost of private insurance, an option made popular by Rep. Paul Ryan
Um, it’s popular but a majority are against it? :scratch head: During the debate over the health insurance bill, there were polls that indicated a small majority of the public was against it. Does anyone recall any occasion when in reporting those results a media outlet referred to the bill as “popular?”
Oh, and another thing:
although the number of working people paying into the program will have decreased from 3.5 per person receiving benefits to 2.3
That is actually quite irrelevant. The economic burden is not based on a worker-to-retiree ratio but on a worker-to-non-worker ratio. That ratio is expected to improve because even as the number of retirees grows, average family size is shrinking, reducing the number of non-working dependents per worker.
Which means the real issue in supporting the system is not some unimportant ratio, it’s the ability of people to have jobs that pay a decent wage and thus the real problem is not Boomer selfishness but corporate greed.
If you want to see some Bash the Boomers in action, check out the comments to this post at TalkLeft.
Yeah, I’ve been wealthy all my life, saved every penny for myself, voted for Reagan and never stood up for the next generation. What planet does that guy live on? Shit, I know kids who spend more on tattoos than I do on food.