The nonsense is flowing thick and heavy now that Congress has just voted to hand the bulk of a $1.5 trillion tax cut to the richest people in the country. Vox is out front getting its two cents in, telling us the big problem is the government debt built up by the baby boomers and the Social Security and Medicare that they plan to collect.The context is an interview with Bruce Gibney who is hawking a new book blaming the baby boomers for everything evil.
The confusion is thick and heavy here. For example, Gibney whines about the debt-to-GDP ratio. Fans of economics might refer him to burden of servicing the debt, which is less than 1.0 percent of GDP after subtracting the money rebated by the Federal Reserve Board to the Treasury. By comparison, it was more than 3.0 percent of GDP in the 1990s. It is also worth noting that this burden did not prevent the 1990s from being a very prosperous decade by almost any measure.
Then we get the usual complaint about Social Security and Medicare. Yeah, isn’t it outrageous how boomers think that they should be able to have an income and health care after a lifetime working? For what it is worth, boomers get a much worse return on their Social Security than the generations that preceded them, both because they paid a much higher tax rate during their working life and also because of the increase in the normal retirement age from 65 to 67.
Find more from this article via Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Related Reading:
Generational Warfare is not a new tactic. It is used to pit the young vs. the elderly in order to justify cuts to earned benefits.
Vox Joins the Effort to Divert Class Warfare into Generational Warfare



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