A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't pay teachers a decent wage has made a dreadful choice. But health care costs are ballooning, eating away at the economy.

The boomers are getting to an age where their knees need replacing and their hearts need a quadruple bypass--which they feel entitled to--but our children aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any goombah with a PhD in education can strip away French and German, music and art, dumb down the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of Shakespeare, and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in the library, which is being cut back too.