the Lousiest Generation
One doesn’t typically look to former Maine governor Angus King for serious departures from conventional wisdom. King, an Independent whose squishy fiscally-conservative and socially-liberal moderation is more a testament to the collapse of Rockefeller Republicanism than an statement of rugged independence, can generally be counted on for bromides about the need for responsible budgets and the native centrism of the American people.
So it was with interest (and, frankly, shock) that I watched as Governor King took an axe-handle to some cherished conventional wisdom on PBS’ NOW over the weekend. Baby-boomers have spent many hours lately defending their own Social Security futures by evoking the wisdom, the character, the simple goodness of the Greatest Generation. King, at 61 a card-carrying member of the Woodstock cohort, casts off the robes of the ‘sandwich generation’ and pointed out what any rational observer has long known: The baby-boom sucks – money, scarce resources, economic vitality.
Calling himself and his peers “the Lousiest Generation,” King makes clear that, by spending and spending and spending on themselves, the baby-boomers have chosen to outsource the costs to a future generation. Wars we can’t pay for, the looming socialized-medicine-for-the-middle class that Medicare represents, and the Social Security bubble that Bush’s ludicrous proposals have allowed us to easily dismiss – these are examples of a willingness of the 60’s types to pay themselves at the expense of their children and grandchildren. And, more gallingly, at the expense of me.
It may be a testament on the debased nature of economic debate in this country that King can sound positively Delphic by pointing out the obvious, but he (and David Brancaccio and NOW) deserve credit for trying to inject a modicum of reality into the current economic debate.
-Keith McCrea
Reviews Editor