Democrats and Social Security -- And Americans

Speaker Pelosi made much of her grandchildren at the opening of the new Congress: “We’re here for the children,” she said.

That is appropriate, for as Carrie Lukas writes, the big government programs are a kind of compact between Americans and their grandchildren.  “Policymakers should evaluate policies based on how they affect future generations.”

Yet politicians — Pelosi herself chief among them — have viewed Social Security as a convenient political weapon, not a problem to be solved. In 2005, when the president launched his effort to place Social Security on firmer financial footing, then Minority Leader Pelosi... sought to squelch debate and use the issue for political leverage... So much for thinking about the children.

Social Security is based on the same premise as the defined-benefit pensions at big corporations.   These programs are based on the idea that there will always be money somewhere out there in the future to pay the pensions.

The corporate defined-benefit programs are now about defunct.  Because it turned out that although General Motors looked as though it would rule the world forever back in 1950 it turned out that it didn’t.

The same thing is going to happen to Social Security.  The only question is: How is it going to play out?  Will the senior citizens grind their grandchildren into the dirt forcing them to pay taxes to support them?  Or will the grandchildren rebel?

And of course, the Social Security problem is minor compared to the Medicare problem.

The interesting thing about this developing train-wreck is that the folks who have represented themselves to the world for over a century as the very incarnation of care and compassion are the very people who are proposing to turn the screws on the grandchildren.

It is cruel and heartless to force young couples struggling to start families to support an older, richer generation, to keep them in their empty homes, to supply them with heroic medical care, while young families go without.

As a 60-year-old, I regard this coming injustice with outrage.  We baby-boomers should not be a dead weight upon the youngsters coming up.  If there is help to be given it should be to the young strugglers, not to the old reprobates.

Someday soon, we conservatives will be called upon to clean up this mess.  We will have to make a decent provision for the older people who listened to the Democrats and believed that they could live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the government to take care of them.  Yet we must also right the injustice and render justice to the young people and their young families. 

It won’t be fun. 

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