Short Class Warfare; Long Age Warfare

by Johnny Debacle

But here’s my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it. Thank you.
Herman Blume in Rushmore

Obama’s total budget is $3.6 trillion, which works out at $34,000 per household; median household income is about $50,000. Which basically means that for every dollar that a US household earns, the US government plans to spend 68 cents next year. And the ten-year T-bond still yields less than 3%. Extraordinary.
-Excerpt from Market Movers

So far, Obama has taken aim at the rich boys. He has taken them to task for their profligate greed. His party has introduced their corporate masters to the Frankonian Inquisition, flailing on them until they have confessed their sins and repented their evil ways. His budget punished their success, reined in their charity, all while giving each of their serfs their very own kingdom. More or less.

While this seems to indicate the rise of a new age of internecine class warfare in America, we’d argue instead that these moves will lead to a new age of productive age warfare in America. What the second quote demonstrates is that this country is not going to be Rich vs Poor. No, the war being fought is Now vs the Future, or more aptly, Baby Boomers vs Everyone Younger.

Baby Boomer Bob will be fishing while the US burns

The effective tax rate for a Baby Boomer is still likely ~30-35%, so say $17,000 out of the $50,000 median income figure. But for younger tax-payers? If there is a deficit, or if what you pay directly in taxes as a national aggregate is lower than what the government plans to spend on whatever the hell they plan to spend it on, rest assured, they are taxing you further in some way. It’s just that instead of current year taxes, the other 30-35% of income that we owe is going to come in the form of debt, and currency depreciation (at some point in the future), and it won’t be a pro-rata distribution based on who benefits from the spending now…it will be based on who happens to be alive when the bill comes due. More or less. That point in the future will likely be well after the Baby Boomers have ensured that their generation has soaked up a higher quality of living — at the expense of younger generations — than any other generation in world history. All the while, they’ll continue assailing the younger generations about how much harder they worked and how kids today blah blah blah…

You know what kids today aren’t responsible for? This mess. This is all you, Baby Boomer Bob and Baby Boomer Betty. You put US here with your wanton spending on cars, houses and erections, with your hubristic manipulation of interest rates and free markets, your sense of entitlement, the way in which you transformed politics and Government into a galvanized arena of Us vs Them. Your cohort’s giant ego has consumed the future.

Rich and poor have more in common than young and old, because in 40 years, rich and poor will still be on this Earth, in this country, having to work together to fix everything the Baby Boomers did. This could mean the inability of the US to get financing because the debt burden has become too onerous, a crashing dollar, entitlement spending that requires more than taxes generate, a change in climate change change (sometimes known as Second Derivative Climate Change Panic Syndrome, or SDCCPC) or any number of structural disasters that lurk in the future and have been put off so that we, the young, are stuck with the buck.

Recommendation: Here’s my advice for the rest of my cohort. Take dead aim on the boomers. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they may be buying everything with your money, but they can’t buy backbone. The sooner we, rich, poor and everyone in-between, come together and shake the Baby Boom death grip off both power and purse, the better.

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