Hey, it was their idea -- I'm not kidding. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson begins his column with a discussion of the presumably humorous suggestion that baby boomers be paid to kill themselves. The column gives the standard baby boomers breaking the bank generational warfare story that appears so frequently in the pages of the Post. Regular readers of BTP know that the generational story is not really any big deal. Our children and grand children will on average enjoy much higher standards of living than we did. The real threats to their living standards are the growing inequality that could leave most of them worse off, a dysfunctional health care system that is responsible for the huge projected deficits that so bother the Post, and of course global warming. But, addressing these problems would require attacking powerful interest groups, so the Washington Post would rather publish columns telling baby boomers to kill themselves.
--Dean Baker
