"The Greatest Generation" refers to the parents of the baby boomers.
My dad (who personally is as conservative as they come, though with fond memories of FDR) is of the tail end of this generation--he enlisted just in time to go to Okinawa. He always tells me people living today don't fully understand what WWII was really like. It wasn't like Vietnam or Iraq where everyone at home carries on as normal while the troops are on the front lines--everyone was in the war effort, whether it's boys too young to enlist working in shipyards churning out a ship every day or two, or old men in Bend, Oregon meeting at the bar and planning how to defend the town in case the Japanese landed, to the rationing. And that's America--not Britain where they had bombs and rockets raining on their heads, and where the success or failure of the RAF could dictate whether your family survived the night. Total war means the entire population is involved, and WWII was the last total war the English speaking world ever fought. Keeping all of that in mind, I'm willing to forgive a lot from the WWII generation.
Back in reality land, a smaller population of heavily taxed and badly paid members of the Gen X and Gen Y cohort will have to change grandma's bed pan and they better be damned productive given how long everyone's living.
They call the offspring generation the boomers after all. The "greatest" did a perfect job in understanding what they were doing in that respect.
Their children, however, are the ones who use their own strength to ensure lucrative benefit programs for themselves on the backs of their offspring in the Gen X/Y bracket.
Did you know in '48 they claimed the cost of nationalized healthcare would go down in time as the population got healthier...?
Also, you could have the American system that only seems to go up in costs exponentially.