Senator Mike Bennet, Colorado College

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Senator Mike Bennet

Part of our national creed is the belief that every generation of Americans should be able to go farther than their parents.

…My mother had even more opportunities than my grandparents dreamed, and she and my father were able to make a better life for me, my brother, and my sister.

But, today, this national creed is profoundly at risk, largely because my generation has not been faithful enough to our grandparents’ example.

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Over this decade, Washington was printing IOU’s for the next generation as well, with our national debt doubling from $5 to $10 trillion, an increase largely attributable to tax breaks for the very wealthiest of us and to pay for a war we should never have fought to begin with.

And on Wall Street, in this decade and before, institutions recklessly and wantonly piled on mountains of unregulated debt that collapsed alongside our housing prices.

We lived beyond our means, and we are paying a heavy price for that today. But even more alarming than any price we are paying is the risk we are running, that we have limited the potential of future generations by burdening them with our poor choices, and our unwillingness to make tough ones.

Our policies and indecision have led us to a place where the gulf between rich and poor has gotten wider. Americans are now less likely than people living in a number of other industrialized countries to improve their economic status in their lifetime. As many as 100 million Americans now live in families earning less in real terms than their parents did at the same stage of life.

The crisis we face today stems from much more than foreclosed houses and credit swaps. It is a symptom of my generation’s lack of attention to the legacy of our grandparents, who built for the future. And now, we must ask ourselves who we will be as a country when we emerge from this crisis. Will we answer the call of this time, or will we fall back on the same tired arguments of the past?

Thomas Friedman, May 18, 2009, Grinnell College

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Thomas Friedman

My generation, the Baby Boomers, well, we’ve been the Grasshopper Generation, eating through just about everything like hungry locusts.

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We got into this financial mess because we got disconnected from some of the most fundamental values that made us a wealthy country. We got disconnected from the basic connection between hard work, delayed gratification, achievement, and success in life.

But we also need the Re-Generation, not to help us only in restoring basic values, but also in creating real things of value. You see, we can’t borrow our way out of this economic crisis. We can’t stimulate our way out of this economic crisis with more deficit spending.

…We have to invent and innovate our way out of this crisis. We have to get away from just financial engineering, designing more and more exotic ways to make money from money, and get back to real engineering of stuff, stuff and services that people need to make their lives more productive, more healthy, more environmentally sound, and more enjoyable.

…Yes, we need good engineers to design those things…

Good ideas on that innovation bit. However, hasn’t Friedman been a lead proponent in offshoring our manufacturing to China and our technology to India, while assuming the millions of laid off workers from these industries would just re-train and find even better jobs. How’s that working out for us? Friedman recently ripped on Obama for requiring Tarp recipients to stop importing cheap third world laborers on H1B/L1 and other visas that US corporations use to bring down wages. How motivated do you think bright US students will be to enter into expensive and rigorous engineering schools when currently H1-B workers in US outnumber unemployed techies?

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana at Butler University on May 9, 2009

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Governor Mitch Daniels

As a generation, you are off to an excellent start. You have taken the first savvy step on the road to distinction, which is to follow a weak act. I wish I could claim otherwise, but we Baby Boomers are likely to be remembered by history for our numbers, and little else, at least little else that is admirable.

We Boomers were the children that the Second World War was fought for. Parents who had endured both war and the Great Depression devoted themselves sacrificially to ensuring us a better life than they had. We were pampered in ways no children in human history would recognize. With minor exceptions, we have lived in blissfully fortunate times. The numbers of us who perished in plagues, in famine, or in combat were tiny in comparison to previous generations of Americans, to say nothing of humanity elsewhere.

All our lives, it’s been all about us. We were the “Me Generation.” We wore t-shirts that said “If it feels good, do it.” The year of my high school commencement, a hit song featured the immortal lyric “Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today.” As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish. Our current Baby Boomer President has written two eloquent, erudite books, both about..himself.

As a generation, we did tend to live for today. We have spent more and saved less than any previous Americans. Year after year, regardless which party we picked to lead the country, we ran up deficits that have multiplied the debt you and your children will be paying off your entire working lives. Far more burdensome to you mathematically, we voted ourselves increasing levels of Social Security pensions and Medicare health care benefits, but never summoned the political maturity to put those programs on anything resembling a sound actuarial footing.

In sum, our parents scrimped and saved to provide us a better living standard than theirs; we borrowed and splurged and will leave you a staggering pile of bills to pay. It’s been a blast; good luck cleaning up after us.

John McFadden at University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley on May 21, 2009

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…But first let’s talk about baby-boomers. It was very good to be a baby boomer in 1968; sorry you missed it.

We had Jimi and Janis, the Doors and the Beatles, and all we left for you was American Idol. After a decade or so as hippies who claimed to reject materialism we discovered arugula and cute shoes and became Yuppies. We also briefly discovered disco, but we don’t like to talk about that.

Moving further still from our youthful idealism, we discovered excessive consumption for its own sake – McMansions and Mercedes for everyone! – and since we did not have enough money to support all that spending we borrowed and leveraged in order to keep buying more stuff that we had convinced ourselves we needed and were entitled to. So deeply were we in the grip of consumerism that when our president urged us to respond to 9/11 by going shopping it made perfect sense to us. Run up your credit card debt or the terrorists win!

We didn’t bother to save because the value of our houses and our pension funds just kept magically increasing. It was good; it was very good! Money for nothing! We spent like drunken sailors and thoughtfully passed the bills on to you.

Now we are getting older and starting to worry about our health care needs. Poor, aging baby boomers! We have never settled for less than the best, so naturally we feel entitled to the highest quality health care for the rest of our lives. There are 78 million of us, and we plan to stick around for as long as possible while you pay for our social security and Medicare.

On behalf of the entire baby boom generation, I want to express my gratitude to each one of you. You get to clean up the mess left by the old economy.

Robert M. Herbert at Pomona College

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Bob Herbert

When I look around at the state of affairs that my generation is handing off to you guys, I have to cringe:

Two wars, global warming, an economy in shambles, the newspaper industry (our main source of information) going up in smoke, the automobile industry up in smoke, the automobile industry (which powered the economy for so many decades) evaporating before our eyes.

The economic recession that we’re in is one of the longest and deepest since the Great Depression. Even people with advanced degrees are not immune to the drop-ff in employment.

Poverty and homelessness are increasing. And we are stockpiling budget deficits that may last for generations.
That is not the kind of environment that my generation inherited. In the mid-1960s, when the first wave of the baby boomers were about your age, the United States seemed like a nation touched by magic.

Unemployment was low. Wages and profits were high. And the nation’s wealth was distributed in a way that was remarkably equitable by today’s standards. The middle class was growing, and it was not yet a mortal sin for a politician to mention the poor. A first-rate college education was eminently affordable.

For all of its problems, and there were still many–it was the height of the Cold War, after all. Racism, sexism and homophobia were rampant. And Vietnam was a disaster. But for all of its problems, the U.S. seemed to be moving briskly in the right direction.
Not even the murderous violence that greeted the Civil Rights Movement could stem the optimism. James Farmer, one of the great leaders of the Civil Rights era, once told me: “They could kill us. But they couldn’t stop us.”

So my generation inherited a rich and flourishing landscape. It still required a lot of work, but it was filled with immense promise.
We were not good stewards of that landscape.
Somehow we allowed the United States to morph into a country that hollowed out its manufacturing base and sent the jobs overseas, That refused to maintain and rebuild its own infrastructure.

That would not establish a first-rate public school system for all of its children. That spent more money per capita than any other country on the planet for health care, but still could not cover some 50 million of its citizens.

It became a country that fought wars but had no idea how to win them or pay for them. A country that let a great city like New Orleans drown rather than protect it with an adequate system of levees.

It’s a country in which a bridge on an interstate highway in Minneapolis collapsed at rush hour, hurling cars, vans and trucks into the Mississippi River 80 feet below.

This is the landscape you guys are inheriting.