The Comeback Read Free Page B

available to so many. The American car in the middle of the twentieth century was what the personal computer would be at the end: one in every home.

    And although the car is very much still with us, Detroit’s day is, as I look out the window, all but over. It survives only by the largesse of that other city I call home: Washington. The relative opulence of Washington compared to the distress of Detroit epitomizes a challenged nation. With apologies to Dickens, this tale of two cities is the story of the expansion of the public sector and the decay of the private sector. It is the story of how the public sector, ever growing, feeds on the wealth generated by the private sector. It is the story of how a once great American industry now must beg, hat in hand, at the table of Washington.
    And it’s a tale I see all over the country, not just on my weekly trips back and forth between Detroit and Washington. Detroit, once the most innovative city in the country, is dying, and America’s innovative spirit is dying with it. In its place are the lawyers and lobbyists of Washington, who spend their work days trying to get the largest share of the Washington handout of taxpayers’ money.
    It’s the story of the decline of America.
THE FAILURE OF A GENERATION
    My parents’ generation worked hard to give my generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, a better world. They worked hard so we could be educated. They endured depressions and fought wars to give us a better future. They sacrificed so we would have a better life. They died knowing they gave it their all, did the right thing, and succeeded.
    Sadly, my generation will not pass on with the comforting thought that we have done our children well. We are the first American generation that has failed to sacrifice for the next generation. Instead, we have stolen from them. We have lived for today. Every jobs bill, unemployment payments extension, corporate bailout, subsidy of state liabilities, and stimulus package; every increase in public pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and prescription drug and health-care coverage is a new debt we pile on our children. These benefits, which we bestow on ourselves, lift us briefly. But they massively burden our children and their children.
    And with each heralded calamity, we focus on how to spend more money that we don’t have rather than on the opportunity to make tough choices and solve long-term problems. Instead, the crisis is an opportunity for a politician to fund his favorite spending program or for Congress to build another layer of bureaucracy. We can summarize this attitude of ours with the words from President Obama’s first White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
    Which is why our children will be the first generation of Americans to inherit a more difficult life. While they will be enriched by technology, they will be poorer by other, more important measures. They will inherit a nation with more debt, less wealth, and greater challenges. More, they may not be equipped to deal with the intense competitiveness of a global economy.
    We are already seeing burdens we put on our children and grandchildren. Spending and pension obligations at the municipal level are forcing cities to cut somewhere, and so we see austerity measures like “Furlough Fridays” for students and teachers, reduced foreign language and music courses, and larger classrooms with fewer instructors. These cuts are a transfer of wealth from the young to the old. We are now cannibalizing our children’s education to pay for our retirement. This is intergenerational theft. We are greedy geezers.
    Our generation is but a link in the chain of generations. But now we are the weakest link. We have blithely assumed that our nation, which has been great, will continue to be great without our making it so. That is the curse of success: We assume prosperity is just something that happens, not something you work for. We had better