Opinion: If Students Can’t Get a Break, Neither Should Boomers

For all the talk of eliminating relief for students bogged down by loans, why not also bring up a discussion of eliminating America’s greatest socialist legacy and biggest budget buster? Medicare, without a doubt is the worst kind of socialist program. Instead of burdening the wealthy with its redistributive structure, the program targets young people and small business owners who are self-employed, working in restaurants and doling out their payroll taxes for entitled old bums.

Ronald Reagan once said the closest thing to eternal life on earth is a new government agency. The same is true for socialist programs like Medicare and Social Security. Although Social Security is also a Ponzi Scheme, it pales in comparison to Medicare's costs.

Several years ago former President Donald Trump gave a speech before a joint session of Congress and declared that “America will never be a socialist country.“

That same year the president made a number of visits to the Villages, a retirement community to the north of Orlando. The purpose of the visit? To bolster support for his failed 2020 election campaign, especially emphasizing the importance of preserving Social Security and Medicare.

The two narratives peddled by retired Boomers don’t add up. You can’t pick and choose the social programs you like and the ones that you don’t.

When beneficiaries receive 4 to 5 times what they paid into a program, the phrase “I earned my benefits“ no longer applies.

Many of the same Boomer-age individuals who clamor about student loans at the present remain on the defensive regarding their own welfare benefits (Social Security and Medicare), while in past decades, those same individuals vehemently opposed the Medicare bill President Lyndon Johnson signed into law.

Future President Ronald Reagan at the time derided the program, warning that “behind [Medicare] will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day, as [Socialist Party leader] Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

In a speech against socialized medicine (essentially one in the same as Medicare), Ronald Reagan also pointed out the passage of the program into law surmounted to nothing more than a boost to auto companies and labor unions.

By offloading the burden of providing benefits to employees, car companies in the United States, desperate to compete with their Japanese counterparts, essentially received a government subsidy, suspending their role of furnishing medical benefits for retirees of their companies.

But Ronald Reagan was not the only politician to point out the flaws of this socialist program.

Bob Dole said of Medicare in 1996: “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare... because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.”

Barry Goldwater also reprimanded the authors of the bill: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts?” Goldwater said. “Why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”

Nothing in the United States' fiscal budget, save perhaps the National Defense Authorization Act, even begins to compare to the massive financial hole dug by Medicare.

Should the aged be provided for? Yes. But the majority of those beneficiaries best ask themselves one question: do they believe in the golden rule? If they do unto others by slashing social programs and safety nets, but do not apply that rule to themselves, then the emperor has no clothes. They are naked and the game is up.

For all the arrogant chatter about Millenials' lack of personal responsibility by the retired Boomer class, at least most Generation Z-ers and Millenials haven't bankrupted the nation.

Hypocrisy abounds in politics. But the so-called moral majority, aging more and more by the day, should at least attempt to live up to their values. Raping young people and the less fortunate of opportunities and safety nets while living high on the hog doesn’t fit the mold of Christian morality they espouse, nor does it enrich the wellbeing of the United States as a whole.

It is high time the Boomer follow the words of Dale Wimbow's great poem, the Man in the Mirror, and revisit their own reflection:

"When you get all you want and you struggle for self,
and the world makes you king for a day,
then go to the mirror and look at yourself
and see what that man has to say."