Caroline Baum puts her finger on the real looming crisis that the folks out in all the various Occupy Wall Street/Bay Street/Seattle/Edmonton gatherings should really be agitating about:
Oh, sure, some protesters have posted lists of pie-in-the-sky demands. (The occupywallst.org website insists there is no official list of demands.) One of these includes a $20 minimum wage regardless of employment, tariffs on all imports, trillions of dollars in new spending on alternative energy and infrastructure, and debt forgiveness — all debt “on the entire planet.”
In other words, lots of benefits and no consideration of the cost. You’d think one of these kids — and that’s how they come across — would have taken an economics course along the way. Where do they think the government gets the money for its largesse? Imposing usurious taxes on the top 1 percent of earners won’t yield enough money to provide for the other 99 percent. (One of the protesters’ slogans is, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”)
It’s not as if young adults couldn’t find good targets for their anger. If these protesters are looking for something to get exercised about, they might want to wander into Chris McHugh’s Monetary Economics class at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and learn about “generational economics,” the idea that government is going to stick the younger generation with the bill for supporting the retiring baby boomers. McHugh asked his students to identify grass-roots youth groups that are agitating about this, but all they found were a couple of minor groups that tended to be Tea Party and Ron Paul spinoffs.
Talk about haves and have-nots. The debt burden that the younger generation is staring at almost guarantees it will have a reduced standard of living. After all, if more dollars are directed at keeping Granny alive until age 102, that means fewer dollars for productivity-enhancing investments.
This idea clearly hasn’t resonated with today’s youth.
Maybe that’s because the numbers — tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security liabilities, for example — are hard to fathom. It’s much easier to vent their anger at bank bailouts and preferential treatment for corporate interests, much of which is justified. They seem to be ignoring Capitol Hill, where the rules are made by our bought-and-paid-for government.
