sorry-grandma

This editorial at Marketwatch.com would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. The jist is this: through colossal selfishness and criminal mismanagement, the lifetime of work our grandparents put into securing their retirement has been spent — and then some — by our parents. This paragraph is priceless:

The Fed, in a bid to stimulate the economy through consumer spending, has cut interest rates to zero. That’s wiped out yields on Treasuries, destroying a traditional safe haven in the process. Meanwhile, years of gutting Social Security has reduced the nation’s retirement program to a shadow of its intended self, and what’s left is about to be swept away by a tsunami of baby boomers just entering retirement.

That “gutting Social Security” part is particularly funny, cuz it happened on Bush’s watch. Remember when they increased the payroll taxes in the 90s? Greenspan told Clinton that the boomers would bankrupt us if we didn’t beef up Social Security, so Clinton, like a dutiful Conservative-lite, raised taxes. Of course, this was another covert scheme by freemarket fundamentalists to discredit the government so they could shrink it and drown it in a bathtub. But at least Social Security was in the black.

And then the Iraq war came along, and Bush (courtesy of widespread venality among us, the American people) raided Social Security to wage a vanity war while lowering taxes for his soon-to-retire boomer cronies. And who paid for this joyride? The parents who suffered through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Thanks boomers!

g-h-w-bush