President Obama versus the Baby Boomers

Obama will be a great president, one of our best ever. I know this because the time ultimately makes the man. He’s the right person in the right place at the right time.

To fulfill this prediction he needs to be able to see the entire forest and visualize a future for our nation. He has visualized the United States as a great nation.

Being able to see a future means that Obama will be able to make decisions that are not just bailout band-aids. Decisions that will stabilize our country and preserve the chance for future greatness.

The number one problem in the United States is also the strength of our country - the Baby Boomers.

Follow the yellow-brick road has always been the mantra of the Baby Boomer. Whatever the current yellow-brick road was it lead to mass hypnosis and enough generalized hysteria to follow it.

First it was get a good education and a great job. This lead to huge competition in the educational system and the work place. Later this was replaced with various mantras like: invest in houses – they never going down in value, or buy stocks - they’re going to the moon. Besides education were any of these mantras proven correct?

Being a member of the baby-boom generation I believe I can see the sacrifices that we’re going to have to make to help our country remain a land of opportunity for future generations.

The 2008 shearing of the Baby Boomers was the first sacrifice. The Baby Boomers don’t like it but it was necessary to keep us focused and to help the country. A wealthy baby-boom generation leads to a lazy under-productive class of people. But a hungry set of Baby Boomers leads to a group of people focused on the future and willing to accept that it’s truly not what our country can do for us but what we can do for the future of our country. This will require more sacrifices. Our parents understood this because they lived through the Great Depression and the wars that followed.

The next sacrifice is that a large proportion of the Baby Boomers will have to delay retirement. Delay gratification. The fact is that the Social Security System was never designed for the parameters of the baby boom (i.e. a huge percentage of the population sucking at the government teat).

The third sacrifice is that medical care for baby boomers will have to be capped. In other words health care dollars will have to be invested where it’s needed most, preventive health care for the young, the prevention of metabolic diseases and advanced medical research.

Organ transplantation is a wonderful thing but it’s just too much for the system.

The advancement of medicine is important. Allowing our parents and Baby Boomers to suck up the resources is just not acceptable.

This leads to the fourth sacrifice. Jack Kevorkian was right. We need euthanasia. It already exists in the countries of northern Europe. This does not have to be a Soylent-Green scenario. Voluntary euthanasia and giving geriatric physicians the training and the right to perform should be all that’s necessary.
Warehousing Baby Boomers with permanent dementia makes absolutely no sense. There are just too many of us and too few care givers and resources.

Whenever a group is asked to make sacrifices they should be compensated. How do we compensate the Baby Boomers for the resolution of these issues?

The first thing is that the shearing of 2008 must be ameliorated.

How do you do that?

It’s pretty obvious at this point that the bailout given to the banks has gone into their coffers and they are not going to lend it out freely. The demands they are making to protect “their money” are just too onerous. People cannot get loans. The entire system is jammed. It’s only the flow of money and optimism that keeps any financial system afloat. If you believe you are going to lose your job and your home it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Money is meant to circulate freely. This flow of money keeps the system healthy.

So the government is going to have to make direct loans to homeowners with only one-string attached.

The interest rate for banks to get money at this point is somewhere between zero and .25%. Anyone who has a mortgage should be able to sign a note to the government at a 3% interest rate and obtain a thirty-year unassumable mortgage. If they keep up their payments (the attached string) then the most onerous part of the housing crisis will be over. I guarantee this will get the economy moving.
What about the fact that 30% of mortgage holders owe more on their houses than they are worth. To get the 3% money the individual homeowner will have to accept that they borrowed the money and so they will have to pay it back.

The devaluations of the housing crisis are not going to end until the next set of Baby Boomers get to the stage where they are in the market to buy a home. This is going to be a while as the next baby-boom generation is now in elementary school.

The second thing Baby Boomers will receive in return for their sacrifices is the ability to opt into this new stripped-down Medicare system immediately. This will put a security net under baby boomers and prevent health insurance companies from exsanguinating their bank accounts.

If president-elect Obama does not recognize that Baby Boomers are the problem and the cure then fewer and fewer Americans will own more and more of the resources and ultimately we will have two classes of citizens: the ultra wealthy and those facing poverty.

Americans are not cut out to take this solution. This result will lead to violence and revolution. We don’t need either. We don’t need revolution we need resolution. The resolution of Baby Boomers to make the required sacrifices.

When there is no opportunity for our young people how long will they be willing to play the game of you-do-all-the-work-yet-you-can’t-get-ahead?

The strength of our nation during our life times has been the strong middle class with cash in their pockets that they’re willing to spend.

I believe Barrack Obama knows and understands these things.

So what makes this a Dark Comedy?

If good decisions aren’t made then we’ll be facing the darkest times of our lives with no respite in sight.

And how come the media and our last sixteen years of leadership have not seen the nine-hundred pound gorilla sitting in the room? It seems pretty obvious at this point. Late but obvious.

If we’re not willing to laugh at ourselves then we better just curl up in the corner and moan because if we don’t make these sacrifices it’s going to get very dark.