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Thingish Things

Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - May• 04•11

Two columns running top-to-bottom on a page in the New York Post today are begging to be linked.

One is headlined: “Debt too big, 96% tell poll.” The other story caption reads: “Graying of US voters.”

It’s not necessary to read the stories. The headlines say it all.  Virtually every American knows we’re spending too much money on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — programs that appeal to older voters — and young people are under-represented  at the polls. Spliced together, these stories paint an inescapable trend:  Young Americans are going to keep getting hosed.

I am amazed that young people aren’t rioting today. Because they are getting screwed to an extent I didn’t know was possible in this country. With 45 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government being borrowed, Washington, with the full consent of a majority of voters, is literally stealing from its children.  This isn’t marginal deficit spending; it’s theft. How can we not be better than that?

It’s ironic that those Americans who truly understand this emergency — the Tea Party crowd — are ridiculed as crazy by those who most appeal to young voters, Jon Stewart, et al. It speaks to the idealism and optimism of youth that they cannot see — or believe — the full extent of the fiscal selfishness being perpetrated by their elders.

I’d like to believe that I would have caught it at 19, but I would not have. I’d be too busy trying to catch 19-year-old girls, unsuccessfully of course,  and closing neighborhood bars. But more than that, I would not have considered it. It was ingrained in me at that age, a priori, that my parents’ generation had our best interest in mind. I considered it natural law.

Isn’t it? How can we be doing this to our kids?

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4 Comments

  1. Your Friend says:

    Does this mean you’re ready to propose some tax increases? We’ll never solve this problem without it. Second highest corporate tax rate in the world, but one of the lowest collectors of corporate taxes in the world. How did we get to that? Government is owned by corporate America. As for spending, we diagree on what is the most wasteful spending in this country.

    http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/

  2. Bill says:

    We don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. If you appropriated 100% of the annual income of the richest Americans, you still wouldn’t dent the deficit.

  3. Your Friend says:

    That’s just a talking point. Even the Heritage Foundation (the scion of conservative economic interests), in its 2011 Index of Economic Freedom, ranks the U.S. very high and that’s because total tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are low in our contry, as a quick look at the underlying numbers shows.

    To be sure, their published papers (and your posts) all hammer home the talking points, but the truth in the numbers cannot be denied.

    http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

    Look at it this way —

    http://www.cesifo-group.de/portal/page/portal/DICE_Content/PUBLIC_SECTOR/PUBLIC_FINANCE/Taxes/dicereport308-db5.pdf

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