G4001-1 Paying for the Entitlement State

     I noticed this morning a young woman reacting to an appeal for a modest amount of money to be added to a retirement fund for certain types of retired clergy.  Her main argument seemed to cluster around the concept of affordability: she and her husband were living on limited means, and even a modest donation to that retirement fund would have been difficult for them. Her's is a situation that will increasingly come to be seen as the typical situation for most working people in this country. Most of them will begin to question why they are funding a lavish retirement for someone else when they are unable to fund their own retirements. At that point the Entitlement State will begin to disappear.
     I am not suggesting that the clergy retirement fund is lavish by any means. It is not. By the standards of most people it is entirely inadequate to the needs of those who have served their church faithfully for many years and are destined to retire in relative poverty. But the principle holds nonetheless. What is at stake here is the social cohesiveness wrought by one group of working persons paying for the retirement of unrelated, non-working, persons. Stories in the news recently of persons retiring on $600,000 per year in California do not make the average working schlub happy about funding someone else's retirement.
     The real question many people will ask in future years is this: "Why am I working to pay for your retirement?"  It’s a good question.
     Some years ago, in a city nearby, public housing units were demolished and hauled away. Those housing units were originally erected for the benefit of those "living below the poverty line."  But the residents of those units systematically destroyed the buildings, the plumbing fixtures, and generally made those public housing units unlivable. In time they were bulldozed and the land was returned to a state of nature.
     The displaced persons ‒ the persons who destroyed that housing in the first place ‒ demanded that new housing be built for them. And, of course, new housing was built for them. That's how we do things in the United States: we reward the destroyers with new stuff because we feel sorry "that they have to live below the poverty line." Yet, we cringe slightly whenever we drive through their neighborhoods and notice the well-kept lawns (city crews do the yard work, you see), the tidy homes, and better-than-average automobiles in their driveways.  It must be nice - especially if one happens to be driving a older, rather shabby, car through their neighborhood.
     The more prescient ones among us begin to wonder who is really the fool here: those who trundle off to work each morning, or those who lie abed until noon each day? Quite soon, in the next several years or so, something called Resentment will rise up to gobble up the Welfare State, when young workers come to understand that entitlements ultimately destroy opportunities for those workers to get jobs, to raise their families, and to plan for their own retirement. Working for a lifetime to pay someone else's freight may not seem like a bargain to them anymore.
     There is an incredibly delicious irony in all of this, is there not?  Those young people who worked so hard to elect Obama will be his very first victims.  Then they will discover how difficult it is to kick one’s own keister.