If Barack Obama is a socialist* does that make Robert Samuelson a radical? Writing in today's Washington Post , he calls on young voters to ???get mad??? at their politicians for selling out their interests to the old.
You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health costs for state and local workers have doubtlessly been underestimated. There's the expense of decaying infrastructure -- roads, bridges, water pipes. All this will squeeze other crucial government services: education, defense, police.
I tend to think that Samuelson is right, and that within ten or fifteen years we're going to see the era of ever-increasing education budgets come to an end, as revenue is diverted to entitlements and more and more instructional funds are diverted to teachers' pensions and retiree health costs. That could lead to some promising developments--greater efficiency in k-12 education, more pressure for reform--but more likely it will just lead public schools to get even worse than they are today.
Samuelson fingers the AARP as public enemy number-one, lobbying as it does for the needs of seniors over everyone else. Which makes me wonder: won't the teachers unions throw their weight around to ensure that education budgets don't feel the pinch? After all, they always say that they are working on behalf of ???the kids.??? But they have their own generational warfare problem, because their most important and powerful constituencies are retired teachers and those nearing retirement age. Which is why we hear the NEA and AFT calling for tax increases rather than pushing for education spending over Medicare or Social Security. If they really were ???for the kids,??? I suspect their position would be quite different.
* By the way, the fact that this socialist isn't voting for Obama seems to bolster the he's-not-a-socialist case.
