I won't ever forget what one of my teachers told me one time when I used the excuse that I "didn't have enough time" to get an assignment done. She said: "You have as much time as everyone else does....60 seconds in every minute, 60 minutes in every hour, 24 hours in every day."
It is a matter of priorities. If something is important enough, you will find the time to take care of it. There are people who want this problem we are talking about solved....but they evidently don't think it is important enough to devote any of their time to trying to get it solved. Not even bothering to vote is indefensible. How damned much time does it take to vote once every two years? These must be really busy people you are talking about.
That's what we do have in the real world.
Young people priorities take more time than old people priorities. Voting is a small part of it. It's about lobbying and establishing political power.
Or young, or old, or in-between. And that right there is why we're screwed. We're already busting through our newest debt-ceiling increase and no one is even expressing concern.
As a boomer myself, I admit that my generation is guilty of creating the problem through our lack of action regarding entitlements. We did not put these hosed-up programs in place - we inherited Social Security and Medicare from the generations preceding us. But we are obviously an enormous lump in the population and we've done nothing to address the problems some saw coming decades ago. Guilty as charged.
But the politicians of subsequent generations are picking up right where we left off. A quick wikipedia search of the 112th congress by age shows 119 members who are gen X. I have not read about any groundswell from that group regarding entitlement cuts. Politicians of all generations are cowards when it comes to making painful decisions. They would all rather get re-elected than do the right thing for the country. We will be Greece on steroids before anything is done.
Someone forgot to tell Zuckerberg
You may not like the way he goes about his business, but this guy is a Gen Xer and he wants to change entitlements and is actively pursuing that very thing.
And there was just a new plan put forth the other day - although I'm not sure who exactly sponsored it. It's bipartisan though.
You may not like the way he goes about his business, but this guy is a Gen Xer and he wants to change entitlements and is actively pursuing that very thing.
And there was just a new plan put forth the other day - although I'm not sure who exactly sponsored it. It's bipartisan though.
You realize that new plan has already been voted down, right? It got like 30 votes.
Horseshit. If you contract with somebody to provide you certain benefits in exchange for you working for them you are entitled to those benefits. That was just as true in 1990 as it was in 1970.
Yep Ryan wants to end Medicare and Social Security as we know them. His plan would devastate most seniors' Medicare. His delusional "we can cut taxes and create ore revenues" has been definitively and empirically erroneous.
I should have waited for Sig's post. I guess we know how many will vote for it.
That is great in legal theory. However, if the payor doesn't have any money, then the payee doesn't get any, regardless of the strength of his legal claim. If you sign a contract with a homeless person whereby he is supposed to pay you $10 million on the day you turn 65, so you forego any savings of you own and then when you turn 65 you can't collect, don't try to blame the homeless guy for your stupidity.
You are way too "pubs good! Dems bad!" Ryan's plan could have balanced the budget by 2024 (give or take a year) if he had been willing to raise taxes. Instead, his budget "solves" the problem by 2040 or so. He's just as much of an blowhard as all the rest of them.
You can find some Democrats who are willing to cut entitlements by some amount. They may not like it, and it may not be as big of a cut as some would like....but you can find some Democrats who have gone on record as being willing to put entitlement cuts on the table...including President Obama himself.... in an attempt to at least begin to work on the problem. http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...ecurity-cuts/2011/07/06/gIQA2sFO1H_story.html
Would someone please post a list of Republican congressmen who have gone on record as being willing to raise the tax rate....by any amount....on anyone....in a reciprocal manner?