The sad thing for Generation Greed is that eventually it will have to end. It will have extracted so much from our future that there is nothing left to take. But in Albany, they don't think that far in advance. All they want is two more years to sign contracts with each other guaranteeing themselves even more future benefits and exemptions from cost, contracts that will be unassailable regardless of the consequences. And though elections are rigged, they still want to disguise the consequence of past deals until after the November takes place, so they can be assured of going back for more.
So how is it that a $400 million MTA budget deficit, now assumed to be a $525 billion budget deficit, just goes away? The answer is that the MTA will borrow $525 billion to get through November. In fact, it has already borrowed $475 million in "revenue anticipation notes" for revenue that was not actually anticipated to come. Since the MTA anticipated it, it could claim a balanced budget. Now it will just borrow $525 million more, for a total of $1 billion. Younger generations will be paying for that forever, with nothing in exchange. And they rejoice in Albany, while pretending $billions in borrowing does not exist.
I was taught that in cases of fraud, contracts are not legally binding. But somehow in Albany contracts are binding on those who did not sign them, and were not told they exist, and if they were told anything, it was a fraud. As in claims that pension enhancements and incentives save money or cost nothing.
Just yesterday Mayor Bloomberg and the head of the UFT went to Washington with a plan. Having previously agreed to slash money for education to allow teachers to spend even more years being paid to do nothing in retirement, they now want to charge the children to get some of that money back to prevent layoffs. By having the federal government borrow the money, letting their generation live large for some more years, and having the children pay it back. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of their lives, as they earn lower incomes, pay higher taxes, and face deprivation in old age, even as their own children are faced with a collapsing school system
And it goes, on and on. Professor Krugman writes in the New York Times that we have to keep sacrificing the future now to prevent a collapse in the present. The problem is when in the last 30 years has his generation (not him personally) endorsed short term sacrifice to repair the future? The deficits he endorses are not a response to crisis — the are perpetual. They aren't preventing a collapse. They are deferring it to a time when, they hope, they are either dead and gone or are "dear seniors" who have "worked hard all their lives" and are thus exempt from any sacrifice.
As I write about economies around the country, one sector (other than the ever-growing, government-financed health care and social assistance sector) is returning to year-over-year employment growth. Which one? Leisure and Hospitality — restaurants, hotels, casinos in the like, with fast food the largest component. My generation's joke was that our economy would end up with everyone selling insurance to each other. Younger generations will not be so well off — they'll end up selling hamburgers to each other — and to the seniors who don't have to work, from age 45 or 55 if they are unionized public employees — for a miniumum wage that is not automatically adjusted upward for inflation the way senior benefits are (even when there is no inflation). They could save some money and eat better by cooking their own damn hamburgers, but most no longer know how.
The shamelessness of it all. The fraud. And the arrogant assumption is that younger generations can be forced to pay taxes even as their benefits are taken away and public services collapse. The state constitution requires a balanced budget? Apparently not. But when it comes to promises that Generation Greed has made to itself, there is no choice but to pay? We'll see. More and more individual rejection of social responsibility is becomming morally justifyable. Generation Greed had better ask itself — what if the majority of our grandchildren are like the majority of us? That is, after all, the way things work in failed states such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somolia.