epilogue -1

Today's quote:

"You know the difference between a terrorist and a do-gooder? You can negotiate with a terrorist." - Unknown. Brilliant, but unknown...


Some have turned to free clinics. It’s just one indication that the health care crisis is really an economic crisis. And for the boomers it’s only going to get tougher, according to Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson.

“If they’ve done their homework, then they’ll be afraid,” he said. “Very afraid.”

Ferguson says it won’t be easy to care for a generation with ailing bodies and many more years to live.

“The baby boomers have set us on a path towards a massive fiscal crisis,” he said. “Which is going to hit as the baby boomers retire.”

The recession, though devastating, will pass. But rising health care costs as boomers age may bring lasting harm to this generation’s financial well-being. By the time all boomers are 65, the senior population will have grown from 40 million now to about 72 million. Who will pay their medical bills?

“This thing is going to blow up,” said Ferguson, “because A: The number of retirees is about to zoom upwards just the way the number of teenagers once zoomed upwards in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s; and B: Because the costs of these systems are completely out of control.”

The strain that the burden of caring for aging boomers will put on the health care system could overwhelm the economy.

If current trends continue, in 20 years almost a third of everything we spend on goods and services will be spent on medical care.

“The cost of health care for the elderly has been explosive,” said Ferguson. “And that is the crisis which seems to be the really big crisis lying ahead of us. We simply don’t have an answer as a society to the problem of a very large number of relatively unhealthy people who live into their 80s.”
And so it goes and will go and go and go until the mushroom cloud climbs over the horizon, blowing up what had been a noble experiment because a bunch of do-gooders really thought they could change the Facts of Life, or that there would never be an unintended consequence to their do-gooding, or that as long as you meant well its ok if you bring down the world's great Liberal Democracy...

Great nations are destroyed from within... by sloth, greed, unrestrained extravagance, arrogance, pride, boastfulness... of their people. They are not destroyed by their enemies nor by the frugal, modest, reasonable, and rational. Our foolhardy attempt to remove personal responsibility from the lives of our citizens and its celebration in our sh*t-for-brains media and pop culture has led us to this sorry state of affairs.

Doubt this? Let me ask you a few questions:

Was our society harmed by:

People starting businesses and employing people?
People saving their money and living within their means?
Parents providing for their children and making sacrifices to provide for themselves?

Not a shot.

Our society has come to this unhappy place because of the unholy alliance between a political elite that sold out the people mentioned above, pandering to those that did not or would not and expanding their numbers with the confiscated resources of the productive portion of society to the point that our financial system is unraveling.

I am sure to get ridiculous anecdotal data points about Ken Lay and Enron... or whoever. I could reply that Bernie Madoff was one of the New York Liberal elite's biggest financial contributors. But this is unimportant. All of us under the age of 60 have already been ripped off, the proceeds of the Ponzi scheme have already been distributed by the political elites, and there is no way to get it back - but the expectations remain.

"And therein lies the rub..."