k wrote:
Nothing will be done, and my generation will be left holding the bag. When I am an old man there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of people my age who are functionally homeless. Having lots of kids is beginning to sound like a good idea.

[ That may work, I guess. We're pretty screwed in this country, in a lot of unfortunate ways. -k]

Actually, that's pretty much the best solution. Now if everyone would do it, we'd be fine. The baby boomer generation will consume every resource as they age and pass on. There are not enough workers coming into the system to replenish those resources for those consuming them in retirement.

This is a worldwide phenomenon, not just US or Western. It's much worse for other countries. Japan and Germany currently have negative population growth and their worker to retiree ratio is less than one and will be less than .5 inside of 10 years. You're talking about some SERIOUS GDP changes for those nations if they don't do something to change that curve.

The fait accompli from the Bush administration would've been to shift retirement benefits from SS to private accounts. It would've exacerbated the result, which would've been that only people who had maintained their 401k's and made greater than average wages would've been able to retire 'comfortably'. Everyone else is screwed. There won't be any social safety nets because we'll be upto our eyeballs in debt, war funding, and the economy will likely be heavily dependent on foreign labor (meaning less lower paying jobs here in the US). Out of all of this though, the health care crisis will be worse. It will collapse on itself unless the system radically changes. It's not set up to handle anything like this.

Hopefully, I'll be living somewhere else.

flynn23 wrote:
Hopefully, I'll be living somewhere else.

Sadly, perhaps, my attitude is exponentially trending in this direction as well. I'm pessimistic about my ability to comfortably and happily continue living here. It's depressing.

k wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
Hopefully, I'll be living somewhere else.

Sadly, perhaps, my attitude is exponentially trending in this direction as well. I'm pessimistic about my ability to comfortably and happily continue living here. It's depressing.

Well, when I said that, it was partially tongue in cheek, as if to say, the grave.

Ultimately, I don't think it will matter. There might be SOME places to run to. But I think that governments as we've known them in the 20th century will be an anachronism. Not to sound too William Gibson, but multi-national corps will likely be the next equivalent thing to that construct. Given that the US and many other nations are outsourcing prime processes of government at an ever accelerating rate, then it's highly likely that the concept of government will homogenize. Much like every mall looks the same no matter what part of the country you're in because every mall has the same stores designed to operate in the same way.

As far as getting less bureaucratic government and more convenience out of the deal, I'm not sure that I'm totally against this happening. If you're a world traveler, particularly of American origination (and stats show that there are more and more of you), it actually helps that health care or law or commerce look and feel mostly the same wherever you go. I think this is in the US's best interest, and it might've been in the stew that propelled the thinking to invade Iraq (we'll spread our culture there so that they'll more likely buy into the system instead of cower against it, no pun intended).

But it's a slippery slope, because for every "convenience" and "market economy" we give to the world, the more "totalitarianism" and "thousand year hatred" we have to injest and solve for. Compromise will be the name of the day. And you're seeing that now as we whittle away at the towers of freedom and liberty and ideals to become more and more just like the other coffee store up the street.

k wrote:

The White House and the Congressional Budget Office oppose the change, arguing that the programs are not true liabilities because government can cancel or cut them.

And cut they will. I've said before that one of my disappointments in the Bush years is that you had a Republican Congress and President and yet nothing could be done about this problem.

[ I'm not disappointed as much as furious... this was purposeful. The Right doesn't approve of social welfare, by and large, but can't easily just come out and say so when it comes to powerful demographics (like the elderly, for example). By creating a situation in which payment will prove completely impossible, they get to dismantle Social Security and Medicare without nearly as much political liability because the hard choice will be left to someone in the future.

I'm not saying everything was peachy before Bush came to power, but it's gotten much much worse, and I do not consider that either coincidental or surprising. ]

Nothing will be done, and my generation will be left holding the bag. When I am an old man there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of people my age who are functionally homeless. Having lots of kids is beginning to sound like a good idea.

[ That may work, I guess. We're pretty screwed in this country, in a lot of unfortunate ways. -k]

Of course it was purposeful. As Grover Norquist famously said, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Well, how that works is you make it so the interest payments are so enormous that the only thing the government can do is the pay the interest and nothing/very little else.