Michael Swickard
“A hundred years after we are gone and forgotten, those who never heard of us will be living with the results of our actions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
For some people society was created with their birth; nothing preceded that act. They have no thoughts of how we, as a nation, got to be the way we are now. They have no thoughts about the millions of hours spent building the cities and roads and sewers and transmission lines. The clock started when they were born.
Others realize today is the product of past generations. Example: We live some of the way we do directly as the result of actions made by both Presidents Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. Yet, we rarely hear their names. If an assassin’s bullet had not cut down President William McKinley, casting Teddy into the presidency, we would be a very different nation. The progressive agenda of Teddy Roosevelt was unlike anything from McKinley.
Likewise, if Franklin Roosevelt had said, “Two terms are enough,” World War II and the world that followed might have been quite different – because a different set of leaders would have had to deal with the war and because a new set of leaders would have emerged. We can never really know these two effects of history, just as we cannot know for sure what effect our actions today will have years from now.
We are planting the seeds for generations unseen that will not know our names or deeds. They will know the results of our actions, but not exactly how we came to create such a future for them. And we are creating a different future for them by our actions involving future debt. We are the Spender Generation, and there is no amount of money we cannot spend. All that constrains us is how much we can borrow.
When future generations look back
So when future generations look back, I am sure that there are a few things those generations will know about us. They will know that we, the Spender Generation, were the most selfish and self-centered generation in all of history. Perhaps they will refer to us as the Spender Generation, or something worse.
How we will get that moniker is that our generation has spent all of the money we ourselves had and then spent much of the money from the future generations. What did we spend it on? We spent it on ourselves. They will know that we did this. Further, they will not live with the same abundance as we have now.
And, if the past is any predictor of the future action, our Spender Generation will continue to spend money from the future for our desires today until something stops them. Future generations will know the Spender Generation spent until it came to the very end of the money available. Then things were not pretty.
When the money runs out, future generations will see that the Spenders spent their time trying to fiddle with the system to restore that to which they were not due. I suspect if we could see what the history books record in the future about this time in America they will say, “Then the Spender Generation cried because there were no more ways for them to cheat the financial system. Those people thought the world owed them the ability to spend beyond their means forever and ever. But it did come to an end.”
As long as the Spender Generation intends to spend that which it does not have while making no plans to pay the borrowed money back, that terrible moment will come. I see no value in recording the names of politicians and leaders of the Spender Generation who took us to the edge and beyond because it is not productive to gaze backward.
Walking to slaughter
The next generation beyond the Spenders will have to grab themselves by the bootstraps and fix the national financial health the Spenders ruined over many years. They will have no choice but to fix the system. Every day the Spender Generation takes the strength of tomorrow and expends it today with no regard for how those actions injure future Americans.
The real stupid thing is that the young people today are walking to slaughter with no inkling of awareness that they are the ones being harmed by this Spender Generation. They text and chat and be social as if there is no problem. Us geezers know what is happening but are just as helpless to stop the descent by our fellow Spenders who say, “We deserve this, and more.”
It is the “betweeners” who are neither young nor old who might have some control over the spending but seem to have no will to protect the coming generations. They will be held accountable by the young who will wail plaintively, “You could have stopped the Spenders but you did not.” And that much is true, they might have stopped the Spender Generation, or perhaps not. I would stop the Spender Generation if I could. It seems that the Spender Generation cannot be stopped by anything other than completely running out of money. Trust me, they will run out and they will stop spending.
As many know, this country has a long history of spending rather than taxing problems. The only restraint on the Spending Generation will come when it can no longer borrow. That day is very near.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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