"Straight shooter's" grim message for baby boomers and their heirs

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Liz Taylor

Special to The Seattle Times

A tip of the hat to Sen. Maria Cantwell for appointing me delegate to the 2005 White House Conference on Aging in the other Washington last month.

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Many experts spoke, but my hero was David Walker, comptroller general and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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"I'm in the fact business," he said, and proceeded to deliver a litany of them. His message: This country's finances are rushing to a cliff, well beyond what most Americans realize.

For example, in 1964, our elected officials had discretion over how to spend two-thirds of the federal budget. In 2004, that plummeted to 39 percent — and goes down every year.

What are discretionary funds? Just about everything that makes our society whole: education, the environment, transportation, housing, national defense, homeland security, the judicial system and other important activities.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002738751_liztaylor16.html

[Warpy]

1. That's because the same thing has happened to the boomers

themselves. Wages have never rebounded in purchasing power to their 1970 levels, before the runaway inflation caused by the oil shocks got blamed on greedy workers who wanted enough pay to live on. Cheap labor conservatives have managed to keep wages artificially low by flimflamming us into thinking inflation was low by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, keeping consumer goods priced at the same level for years.

Boomers have seen their own discretionary income not only dry up but fall into negative numbers as it's taken the unsecured debt represented by high interest credit cards for them to make ends meet.

The bills are about to come due, folks, as the cheap labor conservatives have pretty much managed to choke off the 2/3 of the income generated by consumer spending by choking off wages at the bottom and shifting everybody downward a full class designation. The system can't be sustained at a personal level and it can't be sustained at the state level.

But hey, the rich are merrily bidding up art, antiques, and high end real estate, so all's right with the economy, right?