In case you’ve been on vacation on another planet, the conventional wisdom now solidifying among the D.C. Beltway elite is that old people are a huge problem America just can’t afford, and the only solution is to take benefits and money from them, even if it’s their money they’ve been saving for decades.

So says the Washington Post’s faux economist, Robert Samuelson, who unexplainably got left out of Salon War Room’s 30 most offensive hacks, but ranks at least on a par with WaPo’s George Will (#11) for sheer disingenuous meanness.

Today, Samuelson laments he’s now 65 and eligible for Medicare, which makes him “part of one of Americas biggest problems.” You see, the elderly are unfairly stealing money from their children because — well, because they’re living longer. The only adult thing to do, so the well-healed Beltway adults insist, is to cut their Social Security and Medicare.

But not making cuts would also be unfair to younger generations and the nation’s future. We have a fairness dilemma: Having avoided these problems for decades, we must now be unfair to someone. To admit this is to demolish the moral case for leaving baby boomers alone.

Well, no, it doesn’t demolish anything, because the supposed unfairness is a complete fabrication repeated almost daily by Washington Post editors and contributors. Dean Baker easily demolishes “Samuelson’s demagoguery” here, but I think he’s being too kind.

The thrust of Samuelson’s “unfairness” argument is that Baby Boomers are living longer and thus posing an unsustainable burden on the budget. Gosh, they could become 40 percent or more of the federal budget! Well, so what? It’s the effects of rising health care costs on the economy, stupid, so eliminating Medicare from the budget would still leave the economy vulnerable. Or if we didn’t waste so much in pointless wars, these programs would be an even greater percentage of the budget, but we and the world would be better off.

And never mind it’s the well off and not the poorer who are living longer. Samuelson neglects to mention that for Social Security, the Baby Boomers began paying more in payroll taxes in 1983 and accepted a later retirement age so that Samuelson and I and other Boomers would be covered now without hurting anyone else. And the surplus they/we created for the Trust Fund will leave us fully covered until 2037 or 2039 under conservative assumptions. By then, Boomer Samuelson will be 92 or 94!

Samuelson’s worst argument is an effort to undermine the social bargain that underpins Social Security and Medicare. This is a commitment — a promise — the nation made to its own citizens to ensure their economic and health security in retirement. But Samuelson wants us to believe those who reach 65 don’t deserve that, because they’ll live much longer. 65 is now the new 50, he argues, so these programs are helping “middle-age” folks, not the truly elderly.

You can see where that’s heading. We’ve seen the right wing brand those eligible for economic security programs, from unemployment compensation to Medicaid to Medicare and Social Security, as unworthy. They’re lazy, their greedy, they’re slackers, and all these “entitlement” programs do is make them worse and stop looking for jobs.

Okay, let’s talk about moral hazard. The US Congress just passed, and the President signed, a law giving $120-$140 billion over two years to the richest Americans for doing . . . nothing, just because they’re rich. No doubt this Congress and this President will repeat this immoral giveaway two years hence, turning the gift into trillions. But Samuelson does not include that in his assessment of “fairness.”

Nor does he mention or explain how the majority of new wealth created over the last two decades has gone to the top 10 percent, while an even more obscene portion went to the wealthiest 1 percent.

Attacking the modest retirements ordinary people have taxed themselves to create has become the elite’s favorite sport, and our media laps it up. CBS 60 Minutes recently lionized NJ Governor Christie for threatening employees to give up retirement benefits or having the state simply default; WaPo has been running almost daily “news” articles editorializing against Social Security; the New York Times has featured stories of state and local governments reneging on contract promises to fund public employee retirement systems; and the Irish Government just agreed to “borrow” over $12 billion from its retirement system to help bail out its effectively insolvent banks (Good luck getting that back).

And the media has fallen all over itself praising the millionaires in the Senate for proposing to enact the Bowles-Simpson-Obama catfood proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare, so we can cover the $4 trillion in deficits that will occur when the same millionaires’ club is finished extending the tax cuts. We’re just more subtle than Ireland, but our elites practice their looting on a far grander scale.

America is being prepared to accept it’s okay if government breaks its most fundamental promise to its citizens — to promote the general welfare and provide for basic social security. We’re being told that taking benefits away from retirees and the sick is the “fair” thing to do.

Don’t believe it. It’s theft: criminal, inhumane, and based on lies. And those who propose or carry it out should be hounded from office.

John Chandley