Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
2/21/2011
Ruth Ann Dailey delivers a scathing indictment of those protesting the efforts by Scott Walker and Republicans to restore some fiscal sanity to Wisconsin’s budget. The Greatest Generation that preceded the baby boomers now demanding irrational entitlements and pension plans fought Hitler and survived the Great Depression. The next generation instead invents Hitlers and insists on putting future generations into economic servitude:
Our parents survived the Great Depression, then donned uniforms to fight the Good War and save Western Civilization. We call them “The Greatest Generation.” We use capital letters to honor their achievements and spirit of uncomplaining self-sacrifice.
But they gave birth to us, the cohort born between 1945 and 1964, and they gave us everything they never had. Since fate has demanded little of us, we spoiled “baby boomers” are, as former Clinton adviser Paul Begala (born 1961) has written, “the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation” in U.S. history.
That epic selfishness is on full display in Wisconsin’s budget battle.
…If Democrats succeed in stalling the bill, Walker will have little choice but to conduct a wave of layoffs throughout the state bureaucracy in order to solve the budget shortfall. Guess who will lose those jobs? Under current union rules, most of that pain will be borne by younger workers, in the last-in-first-out structure of the contracts. The boomers will be the most secure.
Of course, not all boomers are to blame, and even those who are blameworthy are hardly alone. The people who set up these structures of public-sector unionization and entitlement programs were hardly the boomers; many of them preceded the Greatest Generation as these were put in place from the 1930s to the 1960s. Boomers didn’t gain significant political power until the 1970s…
…However, the boomers haven’t exactly led on entitlement reform either, which would have to impact that generation most if reform is to be effective. Instead of sacrificing for the next generation, the boomers as a rule want the next generations to sacrifice for them. As a group, they have used their political clout to keep significant reform of entitlements and public pensions off the table until now, when it’s almost too late to fix any of them…
Read the complete article at HotAir.com
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