“The Greatest Generation … stormed beaches in places like Normandy and Okinawa,” says today’s lead editorial in USA Today. “Their children, by contrast, stormed places like Woodstock. For the Baby Boomers — people born from 1946 to 1964 — the prosperity their parents built was never good enough. In later years, they embraced the materialism they ridiculed as youths and failed to save adequately for the retirement that they now face. That’s reaped some bitter consequences for America, says Heritage Senior Research Fellow Chuck Donovan in this morning’s USA Today …
Hundreds of thousands of recession-induced retirements are proving to be terrible news for the Social Security Administration, leading to the total decimation of its annual surplus for the first time in 25 years, according to USA Today. But this morning’s headline really doesn’t qualify as “news,” per se, given that Social Security has been headed toward dark territory for quite some time. The chief actuary for the Social Security Administration said of today’s “news” that, “Things are a little bit worse than had been expected.” He understates the true extent of …
Maintaining and modernizing our armed forces doesn’t just protect America, it fulfills the Constitution’s mandate to “provide for the common defense.” Yet the defense budget appears to be one place where President Barack Obama and Congress are looking to offset massive new spending elsewhere – “stimulating” or otherwise. “The Pentagon faces a $100 billion annual shortfall in its procurement and modernization accounts,” warns Kim Holmes, Heritage’s vice president for defense and foreign policy studies. “The question facing Mr. Obama is not whether to trim a few expensive and unnecessary weapons …
Russell Beland is a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His piece in the Washington Post over the weekend, “5 Myths About the Bust That Will Follow the Boom”, suggests the civilian leadership of the Navy may have too much time on its hands. In brief, Beland’s thesis is that the widely accepted fiscal mess presented by the nation’s entitlement programs, in part brought on by the coming retirement of the baby boom generation, is in fact based on a series of myths and, in any event, “we’re out of …
