Niall Ferguson says that we should be occupying the baby boomers not wall street:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-protests.html
Rings to my recent interests in economics. The generation transfer of burden willb e huge in the next 20 years.
Quote:
Never in the history of intergenerational transfers has one generation left such a mountain of IOUs to another as the baby boomers are leaving to their grandchildren.
When you do the math, there is only one logical political home for today’s teens and 20-somethings ... and that is the Tea Party. For who else is promising to slash Medicare and Social Security and keep the tax burden at its historical average?
Let’s just remind ourselves of the report of the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds back in 2007, which projected a rise in the cost of these two programs from 7.3 percent of gross domestic product to 17.5 percent by 2030. The trustees warned that to achieve actuarial balance—in other words, solvency—for these two programs would require (for Social Security) an increase of 16 percent in payroll tax revenues or an immediate reduction in benefits of 13 percent. For Medicare we are talking a 122 percent increase in payroll taxes or a 51 percent cut in spending.
As Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns pointed out in The Coming Generational Storm, by 2030 there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18 percent more workers. Unless there is really radical reform of entitlement programs—especially Medicare—the next generation of American workers will be paying roughly double the taxes their parents and grandparents paid. This is what Kotlikoff and Burns mean by “fiscal child abuse.”
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