ed, your one-note song about abortion in response to every topic is getting to be repetitive – and tiresome.

[btw, countries w/ lower abortion rates are also struggling w/ the issue of funding their elders' retirement and healthcare.]

Also, if it hadn’t been for abortion, we would have enough people to pay into Social Security and Medicare, as well.

The problem is that we never ask them what they want.

What do “they” want. Who are the “they”? The Taliban? Your friends in Hamas? Who? What if they don’t want anything. What if they are against modernity. which is the root of a lot of the issues between fundamentalist groups such as the Taliban. The bit about airport security is so off the wall, as if the time it takes to get on a airplane really has any baring on our GDP.

Getting back to the baby boomer thing, I too have wondered why there is so much hostility towards this group. As Mark S. has pointed out most of the boomers have been paying in as long as their parents did. So what’s the issue? They paid in, the idea for SS is that you get it back. Medicare is going broke due to mismanagement. We just shelled out billions to the banks, and for what?

We cannot be an efficient economy mastering in science and productivity, while we are aimlessly removing our shoes and belts at airports.

Whatever it takes; get remove the subject of “security” out of our top 10 lists.

Give the people who hate us whatever they want, at any expense so that we can get on withour peaceful lives.

The problem is that we never ask them what they want.

Frankly, I feel no particular loyalty for my much-hated generation. However, there are 58,000 names on a wall in Washington, D.C. as a result of another war that we were lied into. (Please, anyone who disagrees, Google “Operation 34A” and “Gulf of Tonkin.”) Many of them were draftees. I would like to hear an apology in their memory from the vaunted speaker — when pigs fly, of course.

Also, I am constantly amused by the sarcasm, cynicism and outright venom levied at “boomers” who might one day collect Social Security and Medicare. I, for one, have paid into SS for 35 years of my working life. For reasons I won’t go into, I don’t expect to live long enough to collect much of my fictional “trust fund.” (More fantasy, since under LBJ the SS trust fund was comingled with the general fund so that another empty suit cowboy from the odd and irrelevant land known as Texas could fund his own pet war, and it has never been set right.) However, I resent the assertion that those who have contributed to the system all our lives are somehow morally weak or suspect in expecting something back. Apparently, the social contract apparently only applies to generations that historians approve of.

Perhaps we should open Euthanasia Centers.

I might have said “capture” instead of corruption, but it’s fair to call contributions followed by favoring during votes “corruption.”.

Being plain-spoken is quite American. I think Niall is fully naturalized now.

I also disagree with the notion that Americans will not support or embrace socialism. Given the fact that these two are suppose to be historians they left out that during the late 19th on into the 20th centuries both the Socialist and Communist parties had large memberships, it was part of the reason from Roosevelt enacting the New Deal. He was afraid of a revolution.