How very interesting that you would choose to focus on one sentence in a much longer diatribe.

I am well aware of a social order that wants to make it the Boomers fault. We are all victims, and that means it’s always someone else’s fault. You have to find someone to blame.

My parents were children of the depression, the great generation, and they deserve no blame, or do they?

The Boomer generation was probably the most fragmented in our history. Vietnam War. Richard Nixon, Watergate. There became a clearer dividing line than ever before. The rich got deferments, Everyone else got shot. You can generalize your discontent about how much more they have, or how much they screwed up. Perhaps you would do well to do a little self-analysis about who’s fault your situation really is.

A few Boomers have more wealth than they can spend. And a few have put this country in a horrible predicament by virtue of their greed and stupidity. They inherited their parents drive, but not their wisdom. But a lot of Boomers have become disenfranchised. Unable to find work – they’re too old and out of date, regardless of the wisdom and experience they have bottled up inside. Employers want cheap young, manipulable newbies.

The bottom line is, for whatever reasons, this country saw far more wealth gains during the Boomers’ work span than ever before, and most likely ever after. Every generation after the great generation and the Boomers owes far more to their preceding generations than they care to admit. The current dilemma is still the earlier generations’ fault. You want more and don’t understand why you should have to deal with the Boomers’ screw ups. Forget about their gains. The American way: More. And if not, it’s someone else’s fault.

The Boomers are now becoming the bottom of the barrel. The ones that have very little chance of economic gain. And every time things get squeezed, they take the bigger hit. When it gets to the point where enough of them feel hopeless enough, and have nothing to hope for and little to lose, they will act on their feelings. When they see the society they helped build and create crumbling and manipulated by younger people that want more and don’t understand real work or hardship, they may snap.

When they feel totally disenfranchised, they will act. And these are people that have their own network, which people in power understand. And nothing to lose, and everything to gain in terms of self-vindication. The American version of Jihad.

If you knew the Boomers I knew, you would choose your words more carefully. They are true, honest, hard-working people with enormous conviction and integrity. And they don’t suffer fools lightly.

I for one, would never challenge them.

As I said earlier you suffer from a comprehension disorder.

The barely a trillion stimulus package is not much compared to the 4-5 trillions Bush added to our debt; mostly for irresponsible tax-cuts (at a time when we did not need them) and irresponsible wars (that we had no use for either). It is also miniscule compared to the size of our economy and the 7 trillion lost in housing and stock market value. So just as it is not big enough to “reconstitute” us back to where we were, it is also not big enough to cause any significant additional destruction. It is however big enough to help the 4 million people who will get some sensible work to do, rather than being unemployed.

Free market? When was that?

I have a feeling you mean the strawman you call the free market.

And this quote indicates you didn’t understand what I wrote:

“Now you want to trust them to act against their own self-preservation and start spending what little they have because that is how we get the economy going again. Leaving the free market free to do its “free” thing has always had disasterous concequences.”

I said no such thing. What I was very clear about was the government not spending any money under the pretense of a welfare bailout. It is the government which created the original bubbles (aided and abetted by financiers) , now trying to reconstitute it. It will not succeed. What they will succeed at is putting us trillions more in debt.

Actually the best of the crappy paper was issued by all those F’s. The worst of the crappy paper (can you say 10c on the $) was issued by a different type of F’s – all in the private sector. Now none of them can make money if the underlying asset lose to much value and a whopper of a recession makes huge number of borrowers lose their jobs.

“I trust the millions of individuals making decisions”

I say that we have trusted the millions to make prudent decisions on how much to save and to pay for a home and see where that got us. Now you want to trust them to act against their own self-preservation and start spending what little they have because that is how we get the economy going again. Leaving the free market free to do its “free” thing has always had disasterous concequences.

I’ll fight a boomer with a gun any day. If they shoot as straight as they deal, they won’t hit the broad side of a barn. Besides, who are they going to take out their aggression on? Other boomers? They were the main players in the mess, are you advocating boomer on boomer aggression?

Chuck

Anyway, I trust the millions of individuals making decisions rather than a small cabal of politicians/financiers who did not see this coming but pretend to see where we should go. The history of bubbles is very clear–you cannot put the “splat back in the bottle”. There is no Plan.

Reply:

Exactly. Wealth is created from the trillions of tiny decisions made each day by folks negotiating their way through life. It flows up, not down. What flows down is the result of taxing the wealth created at the bottom.

My sense is our beloved leaders are the deer frozen in the headlights of the oncoming truth. They are telling themselves they can make it better even though at some level they must know they can’t. They feel compelled to try something that maintains the status quo. Digging in to do thorough evaluations is not something appealing when the alligators are already there. The only alternatives are a slower death or hari-kari. They must at this point be terrified of civil unrest that will make the race riots of the past a cake walk, and destroy what little social fabric we have. “Boomers with guns is scary”.

@ben22: thanks for the link to the CBO stimulus plan chart I think. But it’s making me incredibly angry. The media has repeatedly said that the 40B state aid had been removed from the plan during the Senate debate. But the chart shows a total of 79B. Granted it starts at zero this year, but it’s still 79B..

WTF????????