I haven't been paying much attention to SOPA, but a comment that my mother made about how my generation is always talking about our rights, but never our responsibilities got me thinking about it

As I see it, as a generation, Baby Boomers can generally be understood partly as a demographic part of the voting public, but also as the generation which holds most of the economic power in the country as they're the ones heading most major companies at this point.

Collectively, the Boomers have voted consistently to protect entitlement benefits. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, etc. They have, however, also voted consistently for lower taxes, and less government regulation of various industries, only swinging back the other way after each of the several economic bubbles burst. This left the government, or more accurately, everyone who could be held responsible for the government's entitlements in a bind. How could they pay out entitlements down the line, and continue to fulfill all the promises of maintaining infrastructure and spurring economic growth if no one wanted to pay directly into the government's coffers through taxes?

It seems the solution was to borrow the money from future generations. The biggest holder of US Debt is the Social Security Trust Fund. The Boomers get their low taxes, entitlements stay afloat for their lifetimes, and all that means is that somewhere down the road we'd all have to pay for their entitlements while they spend the money they would have put into taxes to pay for their own entitlements however they see fit. As it turns out, they mostly saw fit to bet that money on one bubble after another, and then burn up what's left of it on medical costs, since they also vote against any attempt to reform the healthcare system.

But that's fine, right? As long as the economy doesn't collapse, as long as there's a working middle class to pay into the system, all those things would just mean the Boomers get off scot-free and the rest of us are trapped in a permanent cycle of indebtedness to the last generation.

I mean, it's not like the Boomers would vote to relax international trade standards and weaken union rights so that companies could export jobs to lower costs and increase profits while paying nothing back to the workers. They'd never sit back and watch a few decades of employee wages staying flat while executive pay skyrocketed and the real economy stayed flat or shrunk while financial profiteering quadrupled its share of GDP, right?

And, of course, when new technology developed that enabled whole new business models and provided a way for younger generations to start businesses on their own and help rebuild the economy, they'd never vote for a law that would give a few companies the right to tear these businesses apart without warrant or oversight, right? Right?