Tom Brokaw dubbed my parents’ generation “The Greatest Generation” as a way to make up for how badly their kids trashed them in the late ’60s and 1970s. But if you want to know how great, and wonderful and what sheer perfection Boomers think they themselves are, you need only ask them. Take this article from Philadelphia magazine (please), Exhibit 1,237,322 in Boomer Triumphalism. No, this is not — I don’t think! — a parody:
We’re tired, anyway — tired from having changed the world.
We did, you know. We took the stark button-down black-and-white world we were born into and Kodachromed it, tie-dyed it, made it a rainbow of races and genders and candy-colored Spandex bike shorts. You think our force lay in numbers, but you’re wrong. It lay in the vision we had. You can’t comprehend that, because you’re [Gen X] so low-key, so small-scale, so It’s about intimacy. No. It’s not. Thomas Jefferson had it right: It’s about happiness.
If you’ve ever had an honest conversation with your mom or dad, you have us to thank for it. If you get time off from work to take care of a new baby or a sick relative, you’re welcome for that. Getting a tax rebate for making your house more energy-efficient? Bike lanes, pocket parks, hate-crime laws, legalized pot, death-penalty moratoriums, organic food, space telescopes, genome-decoding — don’t you see what we were doing? We were taking the American dream to the max, pushing to its limits the pursuit of freaking happiness.
And then the party’s over, everybody wakes up with a massive hangover, and the check must be paid, as Mark Steyn wrote last year:
Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: “After America: Get Ready For Armageddon”. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists”. I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.
When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately, I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.
Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined.
When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenue, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.
And even those numbers pre-suppose interest rates will remain at their present historic low. Last week, the firm of Macroeconomic Advisors, one of the Obama administration’s favorite economic analysts, predicted that interest rates on 10-year Treasury notes would be just shy of nine percent by 2021. If that number is right, there are two possibilities: The Chinese will be able to quintuple the size of their armed forces and stick us with the tab. Or we’ll be living in a Mad Max theme park. I’d bet on the latter myself.
Or as Steyn wrote a few years earlier, “What’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”
(Headline by Lileks; Philadelphia magazine story found by Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “Baby Boomers: this is why we hate you and can’t wait until you all die.” The clock is ticking…)
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