The Washington Post’s economic guru accuses the primaries candidates in both parties of throwaway promises in the battle for the nation’s progeny. As an example, Hillary is “reclaiming the future for the nation’s children.” Samuelson suggests this is rubbish because he predicts: “today’s young workers and children are about to be engulfed by a massive income transfer from young to old.” He reasons that social security, Medicare and Medicaid primarily for the agéd is now 40% of the federal budget and likely will rise to 70% by 2030.

However, what he fails to envision is that much of the benefits going to retirees are coupled with escalating tax on these “oldies” becoming wealthier from alternative pensions helping offset the rising costs of medical expenditures—and not incidentally generating greater employment and technology. Also retirees are directly responsible for new housing in retirement communities, not to mention all the peripheral consumption putting so many towns and counties on the map.

Furthermore—and particularly dramatized by Bush’s proposed stimulus package to produce greater spending—social security recipients, though most pundits and economists wish them dead, create enormously to the consuming fever driving the economy. Nor can Samuelson see beyond his nose to project the inevitable prospect of large tax rolls from greater paying jobs and larger workforce by tactical immigration, in restoring infrastructure and new environmental investment. Then, too, is the inevitability of huge wealth transfers from the demise of the old via inheritance.

Copyright © 2006 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 23,  2008.

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