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Got Malaise Yet?

By Robert Stacy McCain on 2.9.09 @ 10:55PM

Just in case the Doomsayer-in-Chief's nationally-televised gloomfest didn't totally bum you out, allow me to add more dark clouds to obscure whatever hint of a silver lining you might imagine you glimpse:

Suppose a pipe-dream hypothetical: Somehow, this "stimulus" actually produces a sort of dead-cat bounce in the economy, so that unemployment is down around 5% again by 2012. Is that good? No, not really, because government will have produced that bounce by borrowing massively against the future in a society that's about to sustain a serious demographic shock.

The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011, and every year after that will see more and more retirees going onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls. Even if we raise the retirement age, there is still the net drain of productive labor. The average 67-year-old can't produce goods and services as efficiently as the average 38-year-old and (due to certain legal decisions circa 1973) after 2011, we'll have a growing shortage of 38-year-olds and a growing surplus of 67-year-olds.

We are on the verge of a taxpayer shortage, you see, and what the Democrats want to do is take out a massive loan that will have to be repaid by a shrinking pool of taxpayers, who will be expected to support a burgeoning population of increasingly sickly Baby Boomer retirees.

Just call me Mister Sunshine!

topics:
Barack Obama, Economics

View all comments (7) | Leave a comment

Alan Brooks| 2.9.09 @ 11:09PM

sobering post.

and what will the demographics of crime be?

ruth| 2.9.09 @ 11:46PM

Liberal power grab. Pure and simple.

John Thacker| 2.10.09 @ 2:26AM

Gosh, Robert, you sound just like that other McCain, who called the stimulus bill "generational theft."

Kat| 2.10.09 @ 2:54AM

Unfortunately, it's the theft of our liberty, and we may never get it back.

stysonss| 2.10.09 @ 3:01AM

Not to reach back too far into history, or anything, but if this 800 billion is too much to pay for, was the 1.2 trillion the GOP left Obama a problem also? Wasn't that "borrowing massively against the future" also? Doesn't that debt count too?

Roy| 2.10.09 @ 4:51AM

"the GOP" left "Obama"?

Which party was in control of Congress when that budgest was passed? And who had more of the political power then, the president whose approval ratings were in the toilet or the newly empowered Congress?

Much more to the point: yes, the deficit was too much. Unless the massive wads of cash being indiscriminately hurled at useless bureaucracies in the "stimulus" is to supplant their budgets that get passed through the normal process, this is not 800 billion different dollars, but 800 billion in addition to the existing trillion plus deficit. So now we'd be up to two trillion. PER YEAR.

Though, I'm not sure if the 1.2 trillion number includes TARP, which as much as it sucked was not a pure loss from the government's point of view since they got some bank stock they can presumably sell later.