Young Americans, Free Yourselves!

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

Kids, you’re screwed, but you bought the scam – and you’re still buying it. Whassupwiddat?

American conservatives and liberals differ fundamentally on ownership: Conservatives think your stuff is yours – and the government’s stuff is yours, too. Progressives think your stuff isn’t really yours until the government says it is – an always revocable concession – and your stuff exists only as instruments of social justice and to feed an ever-growing leviathan state.
If we want government to stop taking our stuff, we must force government to spend less money. It’s that simple. But, kids, your money has already been spent. Never mind that you haven’t yet earned any.

Government policies on taxes and spending are both moral and financial issues. Because there is a moral (as well as legal) obligation to repay it, the debt with which the political class has pre-burdened future generations of Americans is immoral on its face. Americans have already been saddled with nearly $17 trillion of national debt – and counting – the payments on which will be coming due before – and after – many are born or begin to work and pay taxes.

Colonial Americans fought taxation without representation. The unborn clearly can’t fight, but why aren’t living Americans – all of us – fighting on their behalf, and on ours? Furthermore, why are young Americans voting against their own best interests?

Conventional wisdom has it that President Barack Obama’s liberal agenda is based on broad support from young, hip, pop-culture-savvy Americans. However, in their economic manifestations, the president’s policies are distinctly anti-youth and, in some cases, reactionary: preserving unsustainable status quos on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Among early-twenty-somethings, unemployment has risen to more than 13 percent, much higher among young blacks and Hispanics. For young people 25-34, unemployment remains high at nearly eight percent. Many of those having jobs are underemployed outside their specialties. National debt per person now exceeds $50,000, a 40 percent increase in the past 50 months.

The massive debt run up by America’s political class will inevitably result in decades of budget cuts, inflation and higher taxes. In ten or more years, as they try to buy homes and raise children while still servicing student loans, today’s inattentive youngsters will finally realize they’ve been had and resent the burden of repaying debts run up by their antecedents.

It should be astonishing to anyone capable of doing simple math that a generation facing a lousy job market while carrying more student loan debt than America’s total credit-card debt still accepts Obama’s incessant appeals for higher taxes, greater spending and opposition to sensible reforms of Social Security and Medicare. If entitlements are not reformed, the escalating costs of guaranteeing their solvency will fall on a so-far-compliant young generation already carrying large personal debts with smaller incomes.

Kids, it’s time to learn the difference between manumission and manure. (Hint: manumission is better.)

The president’s economy sent his approval ratings underwater. A majority of Americans disapprove of Obama’s economic "management." We’re experiencing the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Obamacare remains unpopular; health-care premiums are rising; its taxes are kicking in; and the law is discouraging new hiring and making more Americans part-timers.

Kids – and other liberals – take notice: Cultural warfare is the only thing Obama has left with which to distract you from his dismal record – a record on which he couldn’t and didn’t run for re-election – and from the fact that that he has primed America for a fiscal crisis in a decade or less.

So, in the hope that his "legacy" will not be limited to the damage done on his watch to the nation and, especially, America’s young people, Obama has rolled out the same tired schtick that originally appealed to young voters: soaring but meaningless oratory.

With Obama’s insistence on more of the same, the economy is unlikely to significantly improve anytime soon. Obamacare won’t be easily implemented or its promises fulfilled. So the White House has launched an all-out culture war focused on gun control and gay marriage.

Don’t buy the manure, kids. Don’t be distracted. Keep your eyes on your futures. Hold liberal Washington politicians accountable for the catastrophic financial mess they’re handing you. Identify and elect better, principled people with real political courage. Free yourselves!