'You Kids are So Damn Screwed'

“Young people are screwed… Here’s how to survive,” Bryan Goldberg writes:

You kids are really screwed.

As mentioned in one of my recent articles, unemployment for young people is about double the national average. Student debt is now the single largest contributor to the nation’s credit delinquencies. And it’s one of the few debts that you can never expunge through bankruptcy. Stated differently…

You kids are so damn screwed.

Finally, young people need to understand how much their grandparents’ generation has ruined things for them. The average American retires with less than $70,000 in savings, but an elderly man and woman receive about $275,000 in medical care during that time — and you kids are paying for it by inheriting trillions upon trillions in Medicare bills that granny and grandpa never intended to pay and will be too dead to worry about soon.

“History suggests that era of entitlements is nearly over,” Michael Barone believes. As Herb Stein once said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Glenn Reynolds, whose taken to popularizing Stein’s Law in recent years notes in Monday’s USA Today that “As we head into the next debt-ceiling debate, it’s worth considering these words from a patriotic senator concerned with America’s future:”

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . . It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

The senator? Sen. Barack Obama, in 2006.

I wish that guy was President now.

He is — he’s the same guy who believes in nothing, and is willing to say whatever is politically expedient at the moment, until that statement reaches its expiration date, and its time for the next 180°.

Incidentally, after all of Goldberg’s rantings about entitlement statement, his bio at the end of his post states, “He founded Bleacher Report, and currently advises several startups.” Wikipedia adds, “Bleacher Report was acquired by Turner Broadcasting System (a subsidiary of Time Warner) in August 2012 for an undisclosed sum reportedly near $200 million.”

Think anybody at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO cares about reducing entitlement spending or shrinking the size of government? Nope, me neither. As the man said, you kids are so damned screwed.

(H/T: CC.)