A shift in demographics to relatively smaller cohorts of young people is almost never viewed as presenting an opportunity, just as the challenge of how to successfully support a greater percentage of older people without lower living standards either for them or their younger compatriots is virtually never viewed as one worth facing and winning.
The way a recent New York Times/CBS News poll framed the issues meant the results invariably stayed within the bounds of a relatively narrow range of policy options, rendering a broader spectrum of policy choices invisible.
It’s hard to find a big-state governor who is not sounding a call for “shared sacrifice.” It’s even harder to find one who really means it. At the same time we’re told that real sacrifice requires real pain, we also have to accept that businesses must be exempt from any pain. Instead, states must compete to beg for their favors.
Population stabilization advocates of the late 1960s and early 1970s are still derided as prophets of gloom and doom whose claims about environmental degradation and social costs have been “disproven.”
If one side gives up when it has maximum leverage, and the opposition says only that it will keep fighting for its original position, it's more apt to use the term 'surrender' or 'fecklessness.'
Too many old people
We need our own pollster
The few get to share; the many get to sacrifice
No negotiating with those who take constitutional authority hostage
Obama's Pearl Harbor Day press conference: naive, incapable, or disingenuous?
More limits than we wish to know
Don't call tax cuts for wealthy 'compromise'
And then they’ll say we ratified their scheme
Who needs to reassure whom?
NYC student testing scandal: roots and reverberations