Governor Rick Snyder and state legislative leaders have announced a budget deal that will exempt pensioners 67 and older for paying the state income tax.

April 12, Detroit News : Snyder's controversial Feb. 17 budget proposed a major change to state law in Michigan, where public pensions are not taxed and private pensions are taxed only above $45,000 for individuals and $90,000 for married couples. Under the governor's original proposal, all pension income with the exception of Social Security would be subject to the same taxation as other sources of income.

The new proposal would exempt those aged 67 and older from the pension tax, Snyder said. For people 60 to 66 years old, the first $20,000 would be exempt for an individual and the first $40,000 for a couple. Pensions would be taxed at the full rate for retirees aged 59 and younger.

Lansing’s decision to shield seniors from otherwise across-the-board austerity measures fits nicely with the national climate where

. In other words, younger Americans will continue to pay for fully funded Social Security and Medicare systems now, but receive diminished benefits when we hit 60.

Let's call the current political climate what it is: A war on younger generations waged by their elders.

As former Sen. Alan Simpson (America’s greatest conservative legislator since Robert Taft) once said

." The Senior Lobby needs to be kneecapped, so to speak, because they seem intent on kneecapping future generations in order to pay for the lifestyle to which seniors have become accustomed.

Here is as good a place as any to point out that 55 and older voters are more solidly Republican than any other age demographic, so while Snyder and Ryan and company may believe austerity is the best long-term course, they know it’s bad politics to expect

their

base to share in the sacrifice.

Let’s be clear about something else: Senior citizens are no longer

, a generation that pretty much sacrificed their youth first to hold this country together through the Great Depression and then to protect our nation from the existential threat of fascism. You could have double my taxes to ensure those folks spent their golden years in perfect comfort and I would not have objected.

However, anyone who was 18 on VJ Day will turn 84 this year. The Greatest Generation is now on the furthest edge of the life expectancy tables. Today’s seniors are pretty much baby boomers or thereabouts.

So the generations that benefitted in their youth from fully-funded government services like schools and parks, that was able to obtain a much less cheaper higher education than later generations, that entered the workforce at a time when full employment was the national policy, and then spent the bulk of their working lives paying artificially low tax rates (fueled by massive deficit spending) will either pay reduced state taxes (deductible at the federal level, btw) or pay no state tax on pension income. Meanwhile, the Earned Income Tax Credit hits the dustbin, education funding is drastically cut, and revenue sharing for cities is reduced.

In other words, the very people responsible for the catastrophic fiscal condition at all levels of government won’t have to pay for the consequences of the fat and happy lives they lived. Instead, they’ll whistle to the graveyard and leave the burden of righting this ship to their children and grandchildren.

Of course, the apathy of younger voters plays a major part in all of this. Gen X and Y have only ourselves to blame for giving away the store. That said, no one over 50 can ever again natter on about personal responsibility. They don't even know what it looks like.