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William C. Shelton
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(The
opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News
belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect
the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)
When
The Who sang those words in the late 1960s, some of my generation were
in Vietnam, some in the work place, some in schools, and some in the
streets. But many of us in each of those places imagined that we were
special. We thought that we would change the world.
We did. We
bankrupted our economic system, rejected saving and investment to live
lives of meaningless consumption, made the rich much richer and the
poor poorer, raised spoiled children, allowed their achievement in math
and science to fall to 25th in the world, manipulated symbols on the
papers we pushed instead of substance in the things that we made, and
brought shame to our nation in the global community.
"Baby
boomers" are the 76 million Americans who were born between 1946 and
1963. For the last sixteen years, they have ruled the White House. They
dominate Congress, the largest corporations, and Wall Street. Many who
railed against leaders in their youth are irresponsible leaders today.
As Liars Poker author Michael Lewis remarked, "The rebellion by
American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to
overturn your parents' world when you can buy it, slice it up into
tranches, and sell off the pieces?"
Boomers are special. Their
parents struggled, suffered great privations, endured, and handed them
the best opportunities that any American generation has inherited.
Boomers, in turn, squandered their children's and grandchildren's
birthrights.
Of course the boomers that I'm talking about are
those with some minimum of power and wealth. The poor had little impact
on much of anything, including their own circumstances. The 20 percent
of households with the highest incomes now make 12.5 times what the
lowest 20 percent of households make. This ratio was 7-to-1 in 1982.
The last time that the top 1 percent made 20 percent of all U.S.
household income as they do today was on the eve of the Great
Depression.
During the first administration of Ronald Reagan,
who modeled fiscal irresponsibility for younger generations, the oldest
boomers entered their late 30s. They also entered their prime earning
years and positions of increasing influence. But instead of saving and
investing as their parents had done, they bought whatever they wanted
with debt and without concern for the future. Well before Dick Cheney
said that deficits don't matter, boomers made deficit spending a
lifestyle. And from their positions of influence, they encouraged
others to do the same.
In 1982, Americans saved 12 percent of
their income. During the Bush administration, household savings went
below zero. Between 1989 and 2007, credit card debt increased 300
percent, to $937 billion.
In the last five years, boomers took
$3 trillion of equity out of their homes. What did they do with it?
Census Bureau data tell us that boomer households annually spent $2,400
on clothing, $1,900 on furniture, $3,800 on vehicles, $600 on lottery
tickets, $950 at casinos, and $1,400 on entertainment. They spent more
on restaurants ($4,000) than on charity ($2,900). They spent more on
consumer electronics ($1,100) than on education ($950).
Boomers
who had achieved those positions of influence pushed debt like crystal
meth and produced popular culture that made wasteful spending a virtue.
Those merchants of waste spent $275 billion per year on advertising.
They mailed out 27 billion credit card offers in the last five years,
and they collected $12 billion in late fees annually.
Most
boomers who were squandering their substance didn't give much thought
to those with little substance to squander. Between 1989 and 2004, baby
boomers' median income increased 52 percent, while that of Americans
aged 35-to-39 fell 10 percent.
In fact, median income for
American households as a whole has remained flat or declined for many
years. But instead of fighting for economic justice, sustaining unions,
and insisting on a share of the wealth produced by their continually
increasing productivity, working class boomers compensated for their
declining incomes by borrowing and spending.
Those in labor's
most privileged ranks imagined that they lived in a dream world free of
foreign competition, while their less advantaged brothers and sisters
slipped further behind. The auto industry's labor/management protection
racket allowed executives to "earn" obscene amounts while they waged a
decades-ong campaign against corporate responsibility, fought minimal
increases in mileage standards, and extolled the virtues of gas
guzzlers.
The boomer President and Congress aided and abetted
them. Democrats kept the auto unions in fantasyland while Republicans
sanctioned the gas guzzlers, killed alternative energy initiatives, and
insisted that we "drill, drill, drill."
Economic "growth" fueled
by people spending money they didn't have to buy things they didn't
need made by people who didn't live here created a false prosperity
that was never equally shared, but pointed to with pride by political
leaders. Meanwhile, our economic bedrock was eroding. Those leaders'
policies produced a drop in manufacturing from 22 percent of GDP in
1980 to 12 percent today-a smaller portion of GDP than government
expenditures. Now, 156,000 of our bridges are structurally deficient,
and we buy most of our oil from foreign sources.
The chickens
are coming home to roost. Extrapolating from Federal Reserve
projections, the poorest 30 percent of boomers will spend their
retirement years in low-income housing waiting for meals-on-wheels-if
the nation is generous to them. The middle 40 percent will spend their
meager savings on a modest existence with social security as their only
buffer against real poverty-if the nation is generous to them.
The
top 30 percent will live a high old life, and the nation continues to
be generous to them. Hank Paulson is handing out $700 billion to the
industry that he came from, with the blessing of Bush and Pelosi.
* * *
Much
of America's fall from grace is the inevitable result of economic and
political institutions that, having long outlived their usefulness to
most Americans, are kept staggering from crisis to crisis by the
powerful who profit most from them. But the generation that was going
to change those institutions didn't. They hastened institutional decay
and corruption.
Although the hour is late, there is still a
little time for my generation to redeem itself. Our disregard for our
planet, our neighbors, and our own children has been shamefully
immoral. As in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our redemption requires
confession of sin followed by righteous behavior.
The nation's
future is disproportionately our responsibility because we remain
disproportionately the leaders of our obsolete institutions. We must
find our moral fiber, act with strength of character, look at the
future unflinchingly, speak the harsh truth clearly, and model
responsibility for each other's wellbeing.
We must move from crisis management to transformation. We must keep the promise that we made in our youth.
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