I'm a baby boomer (if you haven't already guessed) and I've decided that the whole financial mess is our fault. We are arguably the richest generation of human beings ever to inhabit the planet. We may also be known for having the highest material standard of living and resource consumption rate our species will ever see.
We have benefitted from:
- Affordable higher education
- Parents who paid higher tax rates
- Unbelievable advances in health care
- Equally stunning consumption of prescription and recreational drugs
- A national highway system we now think of as geological features for our personal pleasure
- Cool toys
- Contraception, sex, and guilt
- More "stuff" (in the George Carlin sense of the word) than anybody else
- More personal and social safety as a people than most of the world, past or present
....to name just a few. All of these things are returns on investments our parents and their parents made. We appear to be unwilling to pay the costs either for ourselves or any one else. We also appear unwilling to constrain our own consumption to control costs being passed to or borrowed from others.
I have no solutions except the third rail ones. Pay more. Consume less. Easy for me to say. I have my stuff.
To paraphrase Louis Black, if you think Democrats or Republicans are going to fix things, you're nuts.
There are some glimmers that we, as a people, have the collective will to try, and that's an encouraging thought. Shucks, there's even a very popular movie running now about Abraham Lincoln! Go figure.
Addison Steele
