The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren
But presidential candidates and their media interlocutors (both groups largely populated by boomers) have said almost nothing about it. The country is headed toward terrible inflation, huge taxes and economic decline? Pfft. Let's talk about flag pins.
So it's up to you, young people. The only hope is that you realize how badly you're getting ripped off and decide to do something about it. Two new dispatches - a book and a movie, both with Baltimore connections - are your manifestoes.
"It's younger people who are going to inherit the debt," says Andrew L. Yarrow, author of Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility. "It's an issue for twenty-somethings. It's an issue for thirty-somethings. And it's an issue for children as well."
The country already owes $9 trillion, a record, and almost half of it to foreigners, also a record. It pays more in interest than the annual cost of the Iraq war.
By the middle of this century, 20 percent of the national income - not just a fifth of the budget but a fifth of the whole economy! - will have to be diverted to pay interest on the debt, Yarrow says. Another 20 percent will be needed to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers.
That'll leave virtually nothing for education, roads, basic research and other investments that make the country great.
On the present course, there are three possible outcomes. Taxes will have to double or quintuple. Runaway inflation will let Washington pay creditors with debased dollars. Or the government will go bankrupt.
Any option would ruin the country economically and probably politically, too.
The answer is an immediate combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Because of interest on the debt compounding year by year, the sooner we act, the less painful it will be.
"We're a rich country, and we can fix this problem," said Patrick Creadon, director of the new film I.O.U.S.A., in a video interview at the Sundance Film Festival. "But we'd better get on it right away."
Nobody's getting on it.
Republicans who pride themselves on responsibility are ruining the country's balance sheet and spouting fairy tales about how tax cuts pay for themselves. Democrats who pride themselves on compassion are causing generational inequity and creating a historic class of victims - Generation Y and beyond.
