Room Eight New York Politics is six years old this month. I guess congratulations are in order for Ben Smith and Gur Tsbar. After all, as editors, they had the foresight and vision to launch this website. Thanks to the contributions from like Gatemouth, Larry Littlefield, Jerry Skurnik, Judge Boyajian, Manny Burgos, Mary Alice Miller, Yoda, Vincent Nunes, Dominic Carter – and all the other prolific contributors over the years- this site has grown exponentially. 

My mother’s church group is made up mostly of seniors who work hard all year as church volunteers even contributing what little extra money they have to their group.  At the end of the year the church provides them with a small Christmas party as thanks for their work, a real treat for people who are on a fixed income.

In the January 4 Financial Times, Alan Greenspan implies tomorrow’s senior citizens are the new welfare queens. “The welfare state in the United States has run up against a brick wall of economic reality and fiscal bookkeeping,” he wrote, because Congress “has enacted increases in entitlements without visible means of funding them.” He isn’t talking about Black people and Immigrants in older central city ghettos. He is talking about benefits for seniors. “The only viable long term solution appears to be a shift in federal entitlements programs to defined contribution status.” So he is asserting that his generation, and the ones immediately after, should only get back what they put in? Almost certainly not. After all, the baby boomers were “the most productive” in U.S. history according to Greenspan, whereas those who will replace them in retirement are those “who in 1995 shocked us by scoring so poorly on maths and in international science competitions.” Let’s give them the poverty and early death they deserve, says Generation Greed’s Greenspan.

What is particularly outrageous about this is not so much what is said but the man who said it. This is Alan Greenspan we are talking about. Remember 1982? Remember 2001? Remember 2007? The best that may be said of Greenspan is that his mistakes enabled those now 55 and over to benefit at the expense of those coming after, and those getting rich as their companies, particularly financial companies, were pillaged to benefit at the expense of the rest. It may be more accurate to claim that these were not mistakes.

Late last night.