Mitt—the hater of boomer entitlements... and apparently young people

Continuing our series on Mitt Romney, today we’ll briefly address his opinion of the sustainability of our current entitlement system and the generation that put it in place. I’ve written about this in the past, and think it’s important to make a bigger fuss about who’s getting the short end of the stick

After talking about the people who fought in WWII (Tom Brokaw’s so-called Greatest Generation) and the sacrifices they made to win the war and build the country, on page 150 of No Apology Romney goes on to criticize the current generation in charge and the system they’ve established:

Today we find in ourselves at a very different moment in history, and I fear that if we remain on our current track, history will come to know us as this nation’s worst generation—because we will force our children and their children to bear the brunt of our recklessness and the willful neglect of the problems we created. The problem is so deep-seated that relatively few of us in the postwar “boomer” generation even understand at a basic level how we are compromising future generations. If we did, I’m convinced that we would do whatever it takes to set things right. […] Never before has there been a generation of Americans that has imperiled the following generations’ opportunity for achievement and advance as we have done. [emphasis his]

Mitt gets it. The boomers have set up vast entitlement programs (Medicare and Social Security among them) and have essentially left the next generation to find the requisite funding. And yet, for some reason, young people aren’t mad as hell. I suppose it has something to do with indifference and simply not knowing much about how the federal government works.

Mitt continues on about how this entitlement problem might be fixed (by cutting benefits and raising payroll taxes) and then finally discusses who will do the fixing:

It is important to conduct the entitlement discussion without scaring our senior citizens, which is why the reforms that are necessary must be made concurrent with guarantees to our elderly that their benefits will not be slashed and the promises that relied upon will not be broken.

Sounds good Mitt, but let me get this straight. Those that have created the broken system (i.e., the boomers) won’t have to share in any sacrifice to fix it? Unbelievable pandering on Mitt’s part here; he knows that seniors vote en masse. If something’s going to be done with our country’s entitlement problem it has to be done by shared sacrifice. Why should those who have broken the system get off scot free?  DO NOT let that happen. The boomer generation has practically thrown our country into the financial sewer and they damn well better help the rest of us pull it back out.