Our financial house of cards

(Noted on TimeBomb 2000)

USATODAY notes that we have A ‘fiscal hurricane’ on the horizon.

Pithy quotes include:

“We face a demographic tsunami” that “will never recede,” David Walker [Comptroller General of the US–FH] tells a group of reporters. “Social Security is Grenada,” Holtz-Eakin [Congressional Budget Office–FH] says. “Medicare is Vietnam.”

Myself, I like the phrase they didn’t use: Inter-generational warfare. Barring changes, I believe it will come to that as Generation X, Generation Y and all those that come after see ever-increasing portions of their paychecks disappear into the ever-widening maw of our entitlement programs.

As someone who was born at the very end of the Baby Boom, I gave up on the prospect of collecting Social Security over 20 years ago when I did the math. I wonder what will happen when the Generation-whatevers figure out that they were well and truly screwed by their grandparents, and decide that “Enough’s enough!”?