Debts the Washington Lovefest Didn’t Balance

As Republicans and Democrats congratulate themselves on their “historic” balanced-budget agreement, younger Americans can’t help but ask about all the other debts--social, fiscal and environmental--they will inherit. The budget debate has been rich in rhetoric about why current generations should not mortgage the future, yet erasing the short-term deficit hardly begins to address the more significant liabilities being imposed on the young.

Many of us in the Generation X cohort have a gnawing sense that instead of inheriting the American dream, we will be inheriting a crippled social structure, a despoiled natural habitat and a government drifting toward the political equivalent of Chapter 11.

Social, fiscal and environmental problems are usually debated separately, but they are really part of the same thing: a large debt to the future. By adding them up, one begins to understand why our generation remains deeply cynical amid all the glowing economic reports.

First, the budget is only “balanced” in the usual self-serving Washington sense: most of the difficult cuts have been deferred until around 2002, and the whole deal rests on the assumption of a continually expanding economy, which could change overnight. The agreement also leaves untouched the large national debt, the interest on which already consumes 15% of federal spending.

But the real fiscal tidal wave ahead is the bill that will come due when the baby-boom generation begins to retire. If current trends continue, expenditures on the elderly and payments on the national debt combined are projected to eat up 75% of the federal budget by the year 2003, and a full 100% by the year 2013.

Americans under age 35 describe themselves as more likely to believe in UFOs than in ever receiving Social Security benefits, which is doubly worrisome. It is not only that younger Americans are paying into a system that they expect to be bankrupt by the time they retire, but worse, that the rising burden of entitlements and debt interest is crowding out the public investments that are essential for a promising future.

For instance, government spending on infrastructure, education and research have already been reduced, over the last 20 years, from 24% to 15% of the federal budget; this downward squeeze will only worsen. How can a generation be expected to provide for so much more when investment in it is so much less?

No less important are the social debts. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich may be out of favor and soon out of power, but he spoke for many in deploring an America “with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds ending up with diplomas they can’t even read.”

The U.S. economy may be the envy of the world, but its social conditions are not. America is home to some of the worst rates of child poverty, infant mortality, teen suicide, crime, family breakup, incarceration, homelessness and functional illiteracy in the developed world.

In addition to this grim inventory of statistics, there is a sense that the fabric of American society is fraying. Civic participation, community cohesion and basic civility are in decline. The long-held belief in the value of hard work is under assault as many Americans work longer hours for less pay, watch the gap between rich and poor grow ever larger and witness their benefits being cut by corporations that have little allegiance to people or place.

The result is a fundamental loss of trust between employee and employer, between citizen and elected official and, ultimately, between people and their neighbors. Yet, basic trust and civility are the requisite pillars on which any well-functioning democracy and free-market economy depend.

Next, there are the environmental debts stemming from the use and abuse of our common patrimony in nature. While there have been some success stories, the majority of our natural systems are in decline.

Each year, the world loses approximately 40 million acres of forest because of cutting and burning; more than half of the world’s fish stocks are depleted or overfished; loss of species and habitat continues at an unprecedented rate, with an estimated 50,000 plant and animal species disappearing each year; and emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to rise, threatening to raise global temperatures by 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit within the next century. To say we are squandering our own life-support systems would be to put it mildly.

Any one of these debts alone would be debilitating to the next generation; combined, they seem devastating. They also raise questions of intergenerational equity, which have profound implications for the future of American politics. How can one generation justify permanently drawing down the social, financial and natural capital of another?

Is it much wonder then why, according to a recent survey, 60% of young, voting-age Americans consider themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats but “other?”