Times ARE tough right now, that’s a given according to this piece. But we won’t give up (we don’t intend to!) if you won’t. — Ed.
Why are so many Americans so depressed about things these days? It is perhaps not just the economy.
I think the answer is clear: all the accustomedreferents, the sources of security, of knowledge and reassurance appearto be vanishing. Materially, we still enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle incomparison with past generations—and the world outside our borders.America remains the most sane and successful society on the planet.
But there is a strange foreboding, adeer-in-the-headlights look to us that we may be clueless Greeks in theage of Demosthenes, played-out Romans around AD 450, or give-up Frenchin late 1939—with a sense it cannot go on. Why? Let us count the ways.
1) About Broke.The collective debt is simply staggering, $1.7 trillion in borrowingthis year alone. $3.5 trillion is our annual budget, and by 2012 whatwe all owe will be well over $15-17 trillion. (No fears: the Presidentpromises to triple the Bush deficit, but by the end of his “first” term“halve” the deficit, as if tripling and then halving it is notincreasing it.)
Today while President Obama railed against AIGbonuses (imagine damning the bonuses you signed into law to the execsfrom whom you took over $100,000 in campaign donations!)—thecongressional budget office “found” another trillion or so dollars inanticipated deficits that Team Obama lost.
So after Obama, the next President will campaignon “I promise a $1 trillion annual surplus for eight years to pay offthe last eight, so we can then start over paying off the old $11trillion shortfall.”
The rub is not just that we are inflating—no,ruining—our currency. And the problem is still more than the fact thatwe are destroying the lives of the next generation, whose collectivebudgets will be consumed largely with health care for us baby-boomers,and interest payments on our debts. (If I get to be 87, can we keepasking 500 or so Chinese to put off false teeth to lend me their moneyfor a hip replacement?)
I think instead the worst element is a sort ofill-feeling about ourselves, an unhappiness as we look in the mirrorand see what we are doing to our dignity in this, the hour of ourcrisis.
We are starting to fathom that when times gotiffy, we lacked the resilience of the proverbial Joads and the grit ofthat tough Depression-era generation, and certainly we seem differentsorts from those who built and flew B-17s amid the Luftwaffe.
Instead, this generation has gone quite starkraving mad the last seven months, hysterical, and decided we wouldsimply borrow, charge it, print money, blame, accuse—almost anythingother than roll up our sleeves, take a cut in our standard of living,pay off what we owe, admit that we lived too high on the hog, and find a certain nobility in shared sacrifice.
So again, here we are reduced to begging theChinese to subsidize our life-styles, while 500 million of their ownpoor make their American counterparts of the lower classes here seemlike well-heeled grandees.