“Greatest generation the most entitled,” Jonah Goldberg writes in his USA Today column:
One thing nearly everybody agrees upon is that the “sequester” is a silly sideshow to the real challenge facing America: unsustainable spending on entitlements. Ironies abound. Democrats, with large support from young people, tend to believe that we must build on the legacy bequeathed to us by the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans, who marshaled considerable support from older voters in their so-far losing battle against ObamaCare, argue that we need to start fresh.
Perhaps it’s time for both sides to consider an underappreciated fact of American life: The system we are trying to perpetuate was created for the explicit benefit of the so-called greatest generation, the most coddled and cared for cohort in American history.
I don’t mean to belittle or demean the heroic efforts and sacrifices of those who served in World War II. But the idea that a whole generation deserves credit for what only some did is little more than an attempt to buy glory on the cheap. One of the egalitarian precepts that all Americans are supposed to subscribe to is the idea that one citizen isn’t more worthy than another, simply by accident of birth. If you stormed the beaches of Normandy, you are due praise and honor. If you were simply born the same year as those who stormed the beaches, you’re no more deserving of praise than someone born of any other generation.
Read the whole thing, and then check out Kathy Shaidle’s new article at PJM: “Five Controversial Ways to Enjoy the Decline of America,” inspired by Enjoy the Decline, the new e-book by Aaron Clarey, whom you may also know from the title of his blog, Captain Capitalism.
Related: Only Paul Ryan is willing to take on Medicare, the 800-pound gorilla, Ed Morrissey writes in the Fiscal Times.
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