The Legacy of the Boomers?

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt.

Speaking as a bona fide baby boomer, I guess I should feel defensive about Victor Hansen's remarks, but I figure the next generation is going to figure out how badly we (forgive the verb, but I can't think of another that fits) screwed them within the next decade or so and by then it will be undeniable anyway.

The current "stimulus" package going through Congress with Obama's blessing will either:

1. Greatly improve the economy.
2. Have no significant effect.
3. Make things worse.

Unless #1 comes true, it's hard to see how spending nearly $3000 for every every man, woman and child in America is justified when future generations will have to pay it back with interest.

Personally, I don't think the bill, with its billions for TV converter boxes and the like, will do any good but will make it harder to fix things (like Medicare) in the future. I hope I'm wrong. I'll even be tempted to vote Dem next time if I am. But it sure looks to me like more of the same kind of thinking that got California into the mess we're in already.

At best I suspect it may turn out be an OK deal for those of us 50 and over and a rotten deal for everyone else. Of course, it will get spun as: "It did work! Granted the economy still stinks, but it would have been even worse without it."

Whatever. Just don't blame this baby boomer if I'm right.