I'm a fan of tongue in cheek commentary. I'm apt to use that approach myself.

Boomers cannot afford to drop dead at this point. Many of us are busy taking care of our aged parents who, due to the advent of so many wonder drugs, are staying alive, independent, grumpy, and uncooperative in unprecedented numbers. After we finish taking care of Mom and Dad at their fully paid for house, parking their fully paid for car in the garage and making sure all is well, we head home to find our 25 year old slob of a kid lying on the sofa texting their friends. It's okay, though. They can still be included on our health insurance at no small cost to us. So in case they should get stressed out about not being able to find a job paying them what they have been led to believe they're worth, they can go see a Doc about how stressed out they are.
FTR, my kids aren't like that. They're grown, married, and making a good deal of money. Of course, as the offspring of Boomers, they've been brought up in a semi-privileged world and understand the NEED to make money. LOL.

Just kidding. Well, sort of. I am a Boomer and I can only dream about retiring. Maybe I will just drop dead so that someone else can do what I'm doing. Hanging on to my job, paying my bills, desperately trying to save more money since my 401K got KILLED in '08, and staring down the 30 somethings who think they deserve my job.

Hell, from where I'm sitting, Bob Dylan really didn't matter. Ever. :(

Because having been once burned, they're too unintelligent to learn from their mistakes?

There are all sorts of the old fashioned sayings about this; things your grandmother said but went in one ear and out the other:

1. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
2. Once bitten, twice shy.
3. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he can feed himself forever.

And on and on.

Safety nets do wear out over time. Especially if they're over used.

Indeed, but advocating the removal of the safety net means that people fall to the ground. Then what? As others have said, you then need more social services to provide for those who 'fall' if they're to get back up on their feet again. GW's just trolling.

Also, my grandmother never said those things, FWIW.

I am already dealing with this at age 38 (except the 25 year old part-no kids of my own). My parents were older when I was born (I was the oops). Dad just passed away last year at 85, now mom is losing her mind:(

OK, SOME Grandmas said those things. :)

I agree that we should help those who are truly down on their luck in the event of a disaster or unforeseen circumstances, etc.

How many times do we help someone who refuses to take necessary steps to help themselves? At what point is it okay to expect that if able, they re-enter mainstream society and begin to contribute again so that others who come behind them and also undergo the the same sort of misfortune are able to have the same level of assistance?

Is it unreasonable to have an expectation of such? The bedrock core of those who are always the "contributors" or the "producers" is shrinking. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that at some point they can be expected to say enough?

I am a big softie, but dang, I'm just about out of being able to keep on keeping on.

I think it's pretty telling that GW Bush talked about privatizing Social Security repeatedly while campaigning yet, once elected, even when he had a Republican Congress and Senate, it didn't happen. That makes me think they decided maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

In this case we're discussing Social Security, which short of being disabled you receive after retirement and you receive based on what you pay into the system. So, we're talking about people who HAVE produced, have helped themselves all their lives. If you remove SS (or privitize it or whatever) most people will probably do ok, although they'll probably work longer. As much as we all work paycheck to paycheck these days I don't doubt that the cost of living would increase faster if we all had our SS money available to us rather than making it easier to save. But that's an aside. So most people do OK, but some people, whether because they've invested poorly, or just had bad luck, will end up needing some sort of safety net anyway. Perhaps they invest in a house and it is destroyed by flooding which wasn't covered by their insurance. Or they were invested in very reasonable mutual funds and following a market 'correction' they end up with very little in the way of principal left. So they have to withdraw to live and that just spirals downwards. But perhaps these are people who were never good at managing their money in the first place, they're irresponsible and had the SS never been taken out of their paychecks they would have spent every last dime. And now they can't work anymore, and no one will hire them to be anything more than a Walmart greeter which pays minimum plus a bit for 25 hours a week. So they need EBT/LINK or they need Section 8 because they can't afford to eat or live. But generally people who are pro-SSprivitisation are against those benefits as well.

I think it is society's job to provide the very basic needs, a place to sleep and something to eat for those who cannot do it for themselves. I don't really believe that there are more than a few outliers who simply choose not to take care of themselves, but that far more are a function of poor health and mental health care, and institutionalized poverty. As much as I mock the "bootstraps" type comment, the biggest problem with it is that it presumes that everyone was born with boots.