Tough love.

• Author: Feldman, Michael
• Position: Not Much, You? - Viewpoint essay

Maybe we need a Super-Duper Committee. Super may not cut it. Look, your average Congressional committee couldn't even nail Roger Clemens. The easy peasy trillion and a half initial onslaught will barely lay open the fascia of the body politic; the patient could easily survive and require massive heroic measures. Can't have that, can we?

I'm not a blamer, but did older Americans really think "Spending Our Grandkids Inheritance" stickers on the back of the Winnebago would engender no resentment to those stuck behind them on 141 all the way to Eagle River?

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Personally, I don't want to retire anyway, so the specter of tough love in lieu of Obama's health care reform or entitlements transmuted into privilegements hardly stirs my thinning hair. True, seventy-six million baby boomers will soon be going boom simultaneously, but by then our severely pruned economy should be sprouting legions of suckers and much shade will be had for all.

Yes, I have concerns for those peristolting ahead down the demographic anaconda. Might not global warming curtail the number of ice floes available to the elderly? Has the time for Vonnegut's Ethical Suicide Parlors, adjacent to HoJo's, come at long last?

Certainly the greatest generation deserves cost of living, but peg it to 1969 when they last made one. One thing is clear: Older Americans want to do their part to stop sucking at the withered public teat. Cost cutting can make short work of dicey social issues--funding Unplanned Parenthood, for example, or extending the waiting period on abortions to nine months.

Public schools, while not the demons to me they are to many tea party educational philosophers, are easily reformed by taking the English approach and calling private schools public. Voila, problem solved, and without vouchers.

Public broadcasting, too long an employer of last resort for people like myself, needs to face the fact that it's been living beyond its misnomer (Z105 country hits is public...