There is an issue of great significance emerging in America: intergenerational equity. We are not being fair to our children and our grandchildren, we are not paying debts that should rightly be ours, and we are indulging ourselves at the expense of the future.
Never has a generation, until mine, left its heirs with as much debt. Never has a generation put so much spending on their children’s credit cards.
My mother and father fought a war and a depression, built up the world’s best highway system and infrastructure and left my generation only a small national debt. My generation fought no world wars, and we have lived in the most prosperous time in human history, yet we are leaving our children with a staggering federal debt. I inherited the world’s largest creditor nation; I leave my children the world’s largest debtor nation. I inherited an America that produced far more than it consumed, and I am leaving an America that consumes far more that it produces. We have indulged ourselves at the expense of our children.
Most Americans don’t fully recognize the extent of the debt we leave. We know of the $7.5 trillion federal debt, but don’t know of the “unfunded liabilities’ for benefits we enjoy but whose cost we leave to our children. The Concord Coalition estimates these unfunded liabilities to be a staggering $74 trillion, mostly unrecorded, unfunded debt for benefits our generation has received or will receive but has not paid for.
To pay off a debt that large, all Americans would have to work seven years and give everything we earn to the government.
While these unfunded liabilities are largely from Social Security and Medicare, every dime of the war in Iraq has been put on our children’s credit cards. Every year, we borrow approximately 30 percent of our spending from the future. While George W. Bush is the most fiscally reckless president in U.S. history, he is just the logical extension of the same irresponsible habits developed by both political parties.
We now have “big government’ conservatives who also feel free to spend and not to pay. The question in my mind isn’t which political party can keep America great, but whether either of them can.
But the greater fault perhaps lies with the overindulged American public. We collectively demand services but don’t want to pay for them.
We tell our children that there is a Social Security trust fund, implying that there are assets that will ease their burden. The so-called trust fund contains government bonds that our children get the dubious honor of having to pay off. As former Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina once observed, it would be equally valuable if the trust fund held Confederate war bonds.
My generation of Democrats fought for social justice, of which I’m proud, but much of it was done on borrowed money. It is easy to be “liberal’ when we charge it.
In their new book, “The Coming Generational Storm,’ Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns point out that the fight for social justice between the “haves and have-nots,’ while not solved, has evolved into a new issue: the “have nows’ vs. the “have-laters.’ We have to create justice not only within a generation, but between different generations. We are failing on both counts.
But the piper must eventually be paid. We are eating our children’s seed corn, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
