01-03-2017, 04:36 PM
(01-03-2017, 09:20 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-02-2017, 03:35 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I always dissent from that first picture. Boomers were statistically less inclined to support Reagan than other generations. They didn't make the decision to institute Reaganomics. The GIs and Silents did that, and the early and core Gen Xers were its most enthusiastic supporters as they grew up under it, and then kept it going.
The big bills that are being handed to the "kids" are from massive entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare; they are more FDR and LBJ than Reagan. Obviously boomers didn't do that since they weren't even alive at the time of FDR and most weren't voting in time for LBJ.
It really comes down to the GIs, who benefited from those programs much more than they paid in. Handing bills down generation by generation worked as long as each later generation of payers was bigger, but boomers were really the last generation big enough to pay the tab.
Bless the GIs for being the most consistent supporters of these programs, and reminding us that if there is a "bill" for them, they are well worth paying. And FDR and LBJ didn't give us our massive federal debt; Reagan and Bush did; although LBJ obviously overspent on the Vietnam war and tried to give us both guns and butter to excess.
Social Security and Medicare are not problems, and are not the cause of the debt. They are paid-for programs. Relatively speaking, Social Security is better paid for than Medicare, but basically it's the same deal. Social Security is massively in surplus, except that taxes paid for by workers for social security has been used for other things-- chiefly to pay off the debt racked up intentionally by Reagan and Co. to give conservatives the arguments they need to cut it. And also by our military industrial complex and its many unnecessary and costly wars, and by needless and useless tax cuts for the wealthy.
And Medicare is the best health care cost cutting program that there is, but the cost of health care is still rising, and that's due entirely to greedy insurance companies, drug companies and hospitals who charge too much. Our Republican mentality is to blame, because single payer would get rid of the high cost of health care in a single stroke, but the "less government" memes of neo-liberalism (trickle-down, libertarian Reaganomics), and ONLY that, keep it from being politically viable.