For Congress, boomer retirement not an issue

The scariest Halloween costume will soon be a Baby Boomer, knocking on a kindergarten door and demanding how the kids will pay for the boomers’ retirement. By 2016, we will have run up another $1.4 trillion in deficits. By 2050, at the rate we’re going, every tax dollar will be needed just to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s a huge burden. The “Greatest Generation” might be replaced by the “selfish generation,” the first in the nation’s history to leave the next generation worse off. The problems are eminently solvable—but only if we begin acting now. The longer we wait, the bigger the burden, and the poorer our grandchildren will be. "Ten Things This Election Should Have Been About" Nieman Watchdog (MA) The "Selfish Generation"--- sort of has a nice ring to it.

Boomer politico: we "screwed things up"

When the Greatest Generation took over state government, they built an entire freeway system, a water system, a higher-education system, and our entire K-12 structure on a state budget of less than $15 billion general fund per year. We can't build a dam, a freeway, a levee, a school or a university on $102 billion. We can hire 50,000 new bureaucrats who will sit around and collect $100,000 a year to think about how they can build a freeway, school, dam or university better, but they will never actually build anything. I wonder what our kids will say about us when we hand this mess over to them. "Greatest Legacy Being Destroyed" North County Times (California)

Boo Hoo: Boomers "ignored" by network TV

TV Land has issued the results of a study that demonstrates how disaffected many baby boomers are by mainstream television programming, which all but ignores members of the generation born between the years 1946 and 1964. The study, which was commissioned by TV Land and conducted by the market research firm Harris Interactive, revealed that a mere 3 percent of boomers surveyed reported that they were extremely satisfied with the programming options available to them. Boomers said that TV does a very poor job of reflecting their core values and providing characters and storylines that are relevant to their own life experience. "TV Land: Boomers Ignored by TV" Media Week Well, there's always the Recovery Network...

Vietnam vets still remember hippie hatred

“(Protesters) were squalling and hollering at us and calling us baby killers,” the Robeson County native said. “It's pretty tough when you get off the plane in Oakland, Calif., and there was the hippies, the Jesus freaks and war protesters throwing rotten eggs at you. We were still Americans.” The wrenching experience continues to haunt Hunt and thousands of Vietnam veterans like him decades later. But many veterans take solace in the fact that most Americans, even those opposed to the war, revere the soldiers serving in Iraq. "Vietnam Veterans Cheer New Attitude Toward Military" The Robesonian (North Carolina)

Is Boomer Congress most inept in history?

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days? These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable. "Worst Congress Ever?" Rolling Stone Boomer exceptionalism: the God that failed.