This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 23rd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

PJ O'Rourke says young people can pretty much blame boomers for everything from the state of politics to crushing entitlement spending

to the lax standards of dress for American men. We spoke about his new book, The Baby Boom,

how it got that way, and it wasn't't my fault and I'll never do it again

yesterday. What can we blame baby boomers for? Well you know I think you, as you seem to belong to a generation that comes after the

baby boomers, everything, we are going to be eating the economy alive.

The youngest baby woman was just turned 50 this year.

So that means, you know, given our persistence and staying young, it means another 50 years of us gobbling Social

Security and Medicare benefits and probably a bunch of other benefits that nobody even noticed.

So all I can really say is, as I say in the subtitle of my books, my fault.

I didn't do it.

These programs were passed by the greatest generation and in fact with Social Security

the generation prior to the greatest generation and they seemed to have been passed with just the amazing idiocy, even by Washington

political standards, they seem to have been passed with no eye on any demographic statistics.

By the time Social Security, statistics weren't as developed a science

demographics in the 30s when the Social Security came along.

But even then, they could have told, just looked at Census report and realized

that Americans were living longer.

Social Security is a great system if everybody dies at 67.5, you know, but already by the time Social

Security was instituted that was ceasing to be true and you can see where the trend line was going. Medicare is unbelievably

stupid. By the time Medicare comes in 68 we know that not only do we know that Americans are living much longer, so the idea of just giving everybody

...