While Mark Steyn's America Alone and the essay that inspired it looks at the Big, Big Picture of the future, Richard Andrews of the Extreme Mortman blog fleshes out some of the remaining details, such as the coming rapid flameout of a generation that Glenn Reynolds describes as "rapacious oldsters":

With endless whining about the fiscal calamity coming with retirement of the Boomers (US!) born 1946-64, and how short-sighted it is not to DO SOMETHING about it RIGHT NOW, I am tolerably amused that apparently NOT A SOUL has thought to consider how TEMPORARY this glut of rapacious oldsters will be. Something will be done, eventually, when there’s no choice, and the piper(s) MUST be paid.

But what of when the the succeeding “Baby Bust” reaches THEIR Golden Years? Will whatever New, Improved (more expensive, and/or less generous) Scheme has been emplaced be undone?

Ha!

The first visible fiscal impact the Boomers had was in the 1950s & ’60s, when places like Baltimore City & County (and the Archdiocese) went nuts trying to build enough schools (and libraries) for them all. Schools and libraries the gov’t. has now spent the last couple decades closing up, or trying to convert to other (mostly bureaucratic) uses. As the years rolled on, this population cohort then fed the edifice complex in Higher Ed. (THIS shows NO sign of abating, but they aren’t concerned with students anyway, really.)

There will come the other end of the string - and I do mean end. Forty years from now, the Boomer generation should begin dying off in droves; [follow the countdown here!--Ed] by 2064, virtually all of us will be gone. (Those that have not long since passed away from obesity or botched lipo, carcinogens in our toothpaste, Chinese deviltry, drive-by shootings, or bad Karma.)

Of course, instead of endless Bing Crosby and Count Basie references, he'll be name dropping the Grateful Dead. And speaking of which, just to ensure that this post has everything and the kitchen sink, have I got the perfect boomer retirement present for you! (With everything that's been mixed in that sink and eventually chundered into it, that's one piece of steel you know fire won't melt.)