Today’s conflict: “You don’t work hard enough” vs. “There is no golden retirement watch, get over it”

As a child, I have fond memories of riding in the doughnut truck with my dad at 4am while he made deliveries. In those days, he would work 10-12 hour days and still not keep pace with his father, who enjoyed to complain, “if only I could find someone to work as hard as me, this business would really take off!…” My father, my stepfather, and every significant Baby Boomer Male that I have known has lived in the shadow of his own father’s work ethic. It seems the self-esteem of the males of the Baby Boomer generation sustains itself directly from, firstly, his “work ethic” and secondly, the size of the souped-up engine in his car of teenage yore.

This is not quite so of Generation X, who, in large part, derive their work ethic from, firstly, their best video game coup-de-grace, and secondly, the size of the souped-up processor in his computer today (!flame! You will burn in the after-flame of my overclocking, byeatch!) Generation X does work, in consideration they have legitimized video gaming as a competitive sport, complete with cash prizes.
Video gaming is work, especially to really buckle down and beat Halo 3 on Legendary level over the weekend.

There is a difference of approach between the generations. Baby Boomers seem to be hurrying about constantly while Generation X is more, well, sedentary. More significantly, there is a difference of concern. Generation X is certainly not as concerned about making money.

The goal of a Good American man, I have learned through example, is to work as hard as he can to make as much money as he can. But what do you do with all that money you make, papa? Well, er, you save it, and you occasionally buy things, but truth be told, you make more money so you can afford bigger monthly payments (bigger house, bigger car, fancier department store) and more of them!
A Good American measures his success in the quantity and quality of items owned and on display.

While Generation X is not as concerned about working all the time to make money so they can buy more stuff, they ARE still getting things. Better yet, Generation X does not have to work so hard to buy them. How so? There is the most obvious reason – credit cards! Consider, my mother requested I not mention to my step-father that I was accepted for an American Express card at 18 when he had only recently earned his own. “Such a privilege wasted on such youth!” he would have said.

There are other influences which ignite a Molotov Cocktail of doom for American democracy. First, more stuff is made more cheaply today, so while we all are behind inflation in annual raises, we are now able to buy more for $20 at the Super Wal-Mart. Secondly, Generation X is the third generation of spoiled brats in American history, and we can all point our fingers of suspicion towards the Depression Survivors for starting it all. So grateful were they for surviving the Depression, they fatefully decided their own children shouldn’t suffer the same fate, and bought their kids lots of stuff and worked really hard to pay for it all.

There is strong likelihood that a Depression today could wipe out an entire generation. If the credit card industry was destroyed, Generation X would be rendered unable to purchase necessary living expenses; none writes checks, and only druggies carry cash! Today, we are so dependent upon credit cards to pay for our lifestyles, we have lost sight of America as a democracy; instead, we live in America as the world’s greatest shopping mall.

The guaranteed rights of the Constitution do not seem to protect the right buy whatever we want, however much we want. Our country serves poorly as an example of democracy when we show off our ability to buy things. American democracy should shine with efficiency and balance of people who work to live, instead of working to pay the company store debt. People who live in insurmountable debt have lost more than a paycheck – they have lost their souls!

By Richard D. Lamm and Dottie V. Lamm

reprinted with authors’ permission

“It wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

- Founding father John Adams

We believe that a new, profoundly disturbing question has arisen in American public policy: Is our political system structured to be able to solve the problems the nation faces? Can we do politically what we must do economically, ecologically and socially to leave our children a workable and decent society?

Before you discard these questions as heresy, remember many of our most famous Greek philosophers felt that democracy was not a sustainable form of government. We pray we prove them wrong, but can we ever stop the slide toward national insolvency, which will collapse the dollar and undercut the economy?

While different studies produce different figures, most of the experts and organizations that worry about the national budget agree that we are passing on to our children debts higher than the total worth of the public and private wealth of the country. The Concord Coalition puts the national debt plus the unfunded liabilities at more than $70 trillion, substantially more than the nation’s total assets. We are clearly the most fiscally irresponsible generation in American society, and neither political party can take even modest steps to balance the budget.

Every dime of the war in Iraq, the recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, every dime of the new avian flu program and a thousand other federal programs we callously sloughed off to our children and grandchildren to pay. Some of these programs may indeed be worthy, but when we cut taxes without cutting spending, we pass the burden along to our children. To our mind, the only honest political platform is: “We are going to cut your benefits and increase your taxes.”

Before you smile at our naiveté, let us suggest that is the only solution that will save our great nation from bankruptcy. We have made promises far beyond our ability to deliver and left the political consequences to our children.

One basic problem we refuse to recognize is that the New Deal is demographically obsolete. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the most politically popular programs in America, and none of them are sustainable without major, political career-destroying amendments. We are living too long and not having enough children to sustain these programs, yet we are paralyzed to act. By 2030, there will be twice as many elderly and only 18 percent more children, and these three programs alone will crowd out all the rest of federal spending.

The programs bankrupting America are programs for the elderly paid for by today’s workers. These programs slowly but steadily put new impossible burdens on these workers’ kids, our kids and everybody’s grandkids. We are seeing workers paying 15.3 percent of their wages into programs that benefit seniors who make more in retirement than most people do working full-time.

We, the elderly, are the real “welfare queens” of American public policy because we are 13 percent of the population but get 60 percent of federal social spending, much of it subsidizing the well-off elderly. A new social policy should transfer money from the affluent to the poor, not from the young to the old, but try to tell that to the AARP. Consequently, day by day, decision by decision, budget by budget we consign our nation’s children and grandchildren to economic chaos.

The second democracy-defying question eclipses the first: How do we leave our children a sustainable ecosystem? Our whole economy incorporates the assumption of infinite resources and endless growth. We are now surrounded with evidence that increasingly shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the growth paradigm.

Our globe is warming, our forests are shrinking, our icecaps are melting, our coral is dying, our fisheries are depleting, our deserts are encroaching, our finite water supplies are under more and more demand. We suspect these to be the early warning signs of an Earth approaching its carrying capacity. We cannot merely call upon human ingenuity, science and technology to develop new solutions to these new challenges. Technical know-how is not wisdom. It is important, but it is not enough. We must be more than technically proficient; we must instead change our economy, our consumption culture and, most important, our mental map of the world.

We doubt that there is any way the rest of the world can live at anything close to the American standard of living; indeed, we doubt that 300 million Americans can. Our hubris notwithstanding, we ultimately must live and prosper within a limited and increasingly overstressed and fragile ecosystem. We cannot meet all the world’s needs and aspirations within our ecosystem. It is true that economy and development have been indispensable to human welfare. But the profound truth is that ultimately our ecosystem trumps our economics. Starkly put, our current patterns of wealth creation and consumption are outdated, outmoded and destructive.

It is no great feat to sustain a democracy when we are distributing the riches of a virgin, resource-rich continent. With notable exceptions during wars and depressions, our political system gave voters more and more benefits every decade. When we couldn’t pay for those benefits, we started to put them on our children’s credit card. No big deal if we add debt temporarily for a short-term crisis, but debt is “economic cocaine,” and we have become addicted to debt. We are haunted by the fact that every generation of Americans until ours has left their children a better America. Our generation however, is leaving gargantuan problems to the future. Our worst nightmare is that these problems might be beyond the ability of democracy to solve.