It's Time for the Adults to Stand up and Be Counted

By Rich Kozlovich

In one of Thomas Sowell’s Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene he made this comment:

“Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: "What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?"

Although this is humorous I have to ask - is anyone really shocked or even surprised at this? Over educated, under smart, misinformed and uninformed is the pattern. Most disturbing is their lack of common knowledge …. you know…. the kind of stuff that was taught in grade school at one time. 

Whenever "on the street" interviews are conducted with college students, or the young in general, they fail in the most basic knowledge.  Knowledge that supposedly was once considered part of our society's “common knowledge”. Furthermore, their knowledge and understanding of history is abysmal. Even their knowledge of the world’s geography is startlingly deficient.  In one Presidential election an interviewer asked young people if Karl Marx would make a good President.  Almost no one knew who he was, what he stood for, or that he was dead.  Why?

Organized education doesn't teach kids how to think, they teach them what to think, and that's the latest form of leftist clabber.  About ten or fifteen years ago in England they did a survey and found almost all the kids believe CO2 causes global warming.  Yet just under half of them also thought that Winston Churchill was an astronaut.

Of course the young have always thought they were the bearers of “new knowledge” and a “new understanding” that would lead to “better solutions” to the world’s problems.   In spite of the fact they have little experience in life by which to weigh their views. 

We all go through that brilliantly stupid stage, speaking in a demanding nonsensical patois completely unaware we don’t have a clue. We not only don’t they have the solutions, we don’t even know the right questions at that age.  So the real question is:  Why are we paying attention to them?

Actually, the answer is simple.  In days gone by that didn’t matter so much because the adult population was much larger than the young population and could ignore them, and then gradually absorb them.  

It was kind of like the Army.  Remember when they used to advertise "The Army Makes Men".  Well, actually what they did was keep them under control until they grew up.  

But all changed when the baby boomers came on the scene! All of a sudden we had a gigantic explosion of the young and dumb telling the world the way everything should be. This was the population leftists have exploited and continue to exploit. As a result leftist insanity expanded outrageously and powerfully, especially at the university level. 

There is a difference between traditional wisdom and conventional wisdom. Traditional wisdom has stood the test of time. Conventional wisdom is merely the latest philosophical flavor of the day and may not last as long as our memory of the last Super Bowl winner. 

Unfortunately, the young are quick to embrace the latest philosophical flavor of the day, and because their numbers are so large it soon becomes policy, and while waiting for the test of time to prove out these policies for good or ill, devastation may be, and has been, left in their wake,

In his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell defined a logical fallacy in this manner:

“Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment."

What is the most frightening about this group is that they don’t seem to understand, or care, what tragic impact their policies may inflict on humanity. They seem to think that “all problems” are “due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.”  

I wouldn’t mind that so much if they were the ones who had to pay the penalty for being wrong, but unfortunately it's always others who have to pay the penalty for their wrong headedness, and that penalty is often deadly. 

That's always a problem when you never have to face the consequences for your actions:  You don’t have to care, you don’t have to suffer, you don’t have to be responsible or bear the blame for those actions.  Especially when you self-righteously believe you're on the moral high ground, and involved in a grand and noble experiment that will save the world, with humanity as the guinea pig. 

After all, their intentions are good!  Right?  Horsepucky!  Along with those who've suffered as a result of their policies, I am really sick and tired of hearing that. As for those who have died as a result of their policies - they can’t hear it at all - they're dead, and when you add all the dead from the "good intentions of the leftist monsters of the 20th century and the "good intentions of the environment movement" we easily have over 200 million people who've died from their "good intentions".

Whether it's the Climate Change fraud or this pandemic hysteria, what we absolutely know this:  All the evidence we need in order to come to a correct understanding of what's happening right now is available for all to see how wrong they are.  Yet we accommodate them, we excuse them and now even worse, we're crawling into bed with them.

The young at least can be excused for their foolish enthusiasm regarding these things simply because they are young. Baby Boomers no longer have that excuse.   If we Boomers are no longer among the young and dumb!  Where are we now?  

This question needs asked and answered.

Are we willing to accept the responsibility for the consequences of these insane leftist policies?  

The Boomer Wealth Boom

A crucial shift in retirement savings helped a generation salt away trillions.

 

Steven Malanga July 11, 2021 @ City Journal

Baby Boomers have been retiring in increasing numbers, and now some are dying. They leave behind a giant pile of money that the media have labeled “the greatest wealth transfer” in modern history: a collective net worth that currently sits at $35 trillion, much of which will be passed down to their heirs. It’s so much money that, naturally, the Biden administration is examining ways to tax it, charities and nonprofits are angling for their share of it, and estate lawyers are licking their chops at the prospect of helping to plan how it all gets dispensed.

Yet news stories about this wealth transfer are overlooking something basic: a simple explanation of how boomers accumulated this wealth amid a supposedly massive financial crisis spurred by the alleged inadequacies of our private-sector pension systems, which, four decades ago, began a shift from defined-benefit retirement plans to individual savings accounts. Rather than leaving a generation bereft, as critics have predicted for years, that shift helped place an unprecedented amount of money in the hands of boomers, while laying bare the inadequacy of the defined-benefit systems that persist today in some places—especially in the misguided public sector.

The seeds of the shift were planted in the 1960s, amid several well-publicized failures of private pension systems (including a plan covering some 10,500 workers and retirees at a Studebaker auto plant in Indiana that went bust, leaving enrollees with just cents on the dollar). Spurred by such disasters, Congress created legislation to govern plans and protect employees, including rules on how workers should be vested in these plans and what constituted minimum funding requirements for pensions. The new rules seemed to make sense until it became clear that they had sharply boosted the cost of funding defined-benefit plans, which guarantee workers an income for life based on a formula that considers a worker’s years of service and final salary.

Unable to meet those costs at an affordable price and wary of the risks now involved, companies began rapidly shifting toward defined-contribution plans, in which employers set aside a specific amount for each worker in an individual account—a type of plan formalized in a 1978 amendment to U.S. retirement law. The share of workers with defined-benefit-only plans in private industry consequently dropped precipitously, from about 25 percent in the 1970s to about 3 percent today, while the share participating in company-owned, defined-contribution pensions rose from 8 percent in 1980 to 31 percent today. Around the same time, Congress enacted laws to let those who worked for businesses that didn’t offer retirement plans save on their own through individual retirement accounts.

Boosted by market returns, assets in these contribution plans have soared. In the last 25 years alone, the combined assets of defined-contribution plans offered by employers and individual retirement accounts (many of which are rollovers from company defined-contribution plans by workers who have changed jobs) have increased nearly eightfold, to $23 trillion—far outpacing the holdings in any other category of retirement plans. Those accounts now amount to nearly two-thirds of all U.S. retirement assets, up from less than 25 percent in 1995. They are the principal reason why Americans are hanging onto some $34 trillion in retirement savings, a startling increase from about $13 trillion two and a half decades ago.

Over time, the rate at which Americans have saved for retirement has increased impressively. A 2016 study of gains in retirement savings over a 27-year period by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute found that retirement savings of those aged 55 to 69 grew by 126 percent after inflation, to $448,292. The gains haven’t all been concentrated among the rich, either. As Biggs points out, even the retirement savings of middle-income Americans increased by 70 percent after inflation in that time. With these gains has come a sharp decline in poverty among seniors. When Social Security benefits are included in the mix, fewer than 10 percent of the elderly retire with less than half of the income they earned while working.

Something very different happened in the public sector, however. There, the defined benefit survived, in large part because federal legislation laying out standards for private plans did not apply. Local governments promised workers attractive pensions using looser accounting principles, making those plans seem more affordable. Consequently, 86 percent of state and local government workers still have access to defined-benefit plans today—but at an enormous public cost. States and localities have shortchanged these systems by some $1.7 trillion, which taxpayers largely are on the hook for as more and more government workers retire. Even amid this funding disaster, public-sector union leaders have vigorously fought to preserve defined-benefit plans, characterizing efforts to junk them in favor of individual savings accounts as a disaster that would increase poverty among seniors and expand retirement insecurity.

The attraction of defined-benefit plans is understandable. They offer predictability, which seems especially significant amid all the media stories about a retirement crisis that private sector workers face. But they pay off only for workers who commit to a lengthy career of public service with one employer and then live long enough to collect a substantial portion of their benefits. These pensions put away very little for workers in the early years of their employment. A 2013 Manhattan Institute study of public school retirement systems, for instance, found that a New York teacher who began in the schools at age 25 would, by the time he reached 50, accumulate the equivalent of a mere $100,000 in retirement savings through a defined-benefit plan. But if that teacher remained another 15 years, those savings would zoom to the equivalent of $600,000. The problem is that fewer than 33 percent of those who begin a career as a teacher remain even 20 years. Rich pensions are the preserve of the few who stick it out. And even after a long career, much of the benefit disappears when the worker dies, leaving little to pass on. Though some defined-benefit plans do offer spousal benefits—typically about 50 percent of the original pension—these are costly for the worker and, of course, leave nothing to pass on to children and grandchildren.

Government is nothing if not covetous of wealth created in the private sector. Now that the narrative is changing from “those poor retiring boomers” to “those rich retiring boomers,” proposals have emerged to tax these savings in new ways. The Biden administration has proposed a tax on capital gains in retirement accounts at the point of transfer to heirs. Other proposals include capping the amount that can reside in tax-free retirement accounts and taxing the rest. For years, politicians in both parties have considered “saving” Social Security in part by reducing or eliminating benefits earned by those who have accumulated several million dollars in retirement accounts—an idea that smacks of punishing folks who did the right thing by preparing for their golden years.

As boomers prepare to go not gently, but richly, into that good night, the struggle for what they will leave behind is just beginning.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

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Baby Boomers are Living Proof That Pesticides Are Safe

New Mexico Pest Management Association

The Baby Boom generation holds a lot of distinctions, but one you may not have thought about is this ... Baby Boomers are the first generation to grow up eating food treated with pesticides. Synthetic chemical pesticides were introduced in the 1940s, when our nation needed to produce more food to feed the post-war babies. Pesticides protected crops from harmful bugs and plant diseases. Their use by farmers helped ensure both the quality and quantity of the food supply.

These early pesticides have been greatly improved. Crop protection chemicals now used by farmers are safer and degrade much more quickly in the environment. Yet, environmental activist groups continue to attack pesticide use. Lately, the rhetoric has become more reckless and desperate.

If pesticides are as harmful to human health as the Environmental Working Group and Consumers Union would have you believe, then there ought to be plenty of proof of this in the Baby Boom generation which has lived 50 years with pesticide-treated food......To Read More....