Better get your tin cup and pencils now, you senior citizens

We keep hearing this from the more fiscal conservatives among us: 'we are spending our children and grandchildren into bankruptcy.'  If I've heard that once, I've heard it a thousand times.

While it is clearly true our liberal politicians are spending money we don't have like drunken sailors, and sinking our country into a debt crisis, our children and grandchildren will not be the ones paying for it, at least not directly.  This is the dirty little secret that nobody seems to want to hear: our children and grandchildren will not inherit our current debt: they will simply see to it that none of the fruits of their future labor, whenever they get into the job market, will be transferred to pay for debts that they themselves did not incur.

Unless things change, and we get our debt and public employee pension chaos in order, our kids and grandkids will not support this ongoing moral corruption in perpetuity.

They just won't do it.  They did not sign these contracts for pensions and other transfers to retirees and pensioners.  They will insist that these old folks go after the people who made the promises, and get the money from them, and leave the kids and grandkids bank accounts alone.

But Fredd, those people who made all of these immoral promises and contracts are all dead by the time the piper needs to be paid.  Exactly my point.  Do you think that our children and grandchildren, who will grow up to be men and women (angry men and angry women) will just sit by and let their earnings be confiscated and given to old people who no longer work, these old geezers who lounge by their Boca Raton swimming pools sipping their Mai Tai's, at the expense of the next generation?  The next generation or two is most certainly going to say nuts to that. 

But Fredd, these oldsters were promised their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, free medicine for the rest of their lives, and both public and private pensioners have binding contracts.  So what?  What is going to stop the future generations from pulling the plug on those promised checks?  Virtually nothing.  Things change.  And if you are somebody who depends on receiving a check every month to maintain a certain standard of living in your retirement, you are the one who will be paying in one way or another the debt that these pundits are saying will be covered by our kids and grandkids.  If somebody else controls your income stream in retirement OTHER THAN YOU, your future is iffy at best, my old geezer friends. 

Not a chance in hell will our kids and grandkids just sit by and watch their incomes go to fund geezers laying around in their retirement hammocks in Boca Raton.  Does the French Revolution ring a bell with anyone?  King Louis XVI and his aristocrats and religious poo bahs were all living the good life, as established by a centuries old monarchy and aristocracy.  All of the wealth of France was at these chosen few's disposal.  By law.  The Royal French Law of the Land awarded this wealth to the few.

But the peasants with the pitchforks didn't like the way things were legally arranged, because legally they were getting Royally screwed (pun intended) and so they changed things.  And so it will go with OUR current legal contracts with unions, governments and the like: our kids and grandkids did not incur all of this debt, and they will simply not pay it any more.

You geezers who don't control your own retirement funds are the ones who are going to be left holding the bag.  Once your checks stop showing up in the mail box (and they will, I guarantee it), your days of comfy, cozy retirement are over.  Better get yourselves some tin cups, some pencils and find yourself a street corner to work. 

And you geezers better do it soon, as there is going to be a run on tin cups, pencils and street corners to work.