A letter to the children I hope to have someday

The following is a letter I fear I might have to write to my children depending how how this economic mess plays out over the next few years. Let's hope I'm wrong and it doesn't come to what I'm about to describe.


Kids, (I'd use their names since we've already picked them, but my wife would shoot me)

I feel the need to apologize to you and any children you might have someday because your future has been sold to China and Russia. Yes, though they may not tell you that in school, that's what happened. Back before you were born, we (and by we, I mean the US as we knew it then) got ourselves (well, really I had nothing to do with it personally, but you get the idea) into a nasty economic mess. Right around the time it was all coming to a head, a new administration took office with a vision for the future that looked nothing like the past. That vision included having the US government take over nearly every aspect of our lives. Rather than being responsible for our own health care, housing, retirement, education, etc. this administration decided that the government was best suited to do all of that for us - because the government had been so efficient at managing the things they were already in charge of!

The problem was that we as a nation didn't have the funds necessary to pay for the socialization of all these programs. We tried to tax the stuffing out of anyone making more than $250,000 per year (we called them rich people, and certainly they were doing well), but that did not yield enough "savings" (that's what the President called it, really it was raising more funds, savings would have been if we could have cut spending somewhere). We tried taking away deductions and taxing other things, but still came up far short of the trillions in spending that were agreed to by the geniuses in Washington (of both parties). The show had to go on, so we printed the money and spent the money anyway, but since we didn't really have the money we were forced to do 2 things:

1. We borrowed it from investors in places like China and Russia (and anywhere else that we could). That worked for a while until they all realized that there was no way we would ever be able to pay all that we owed. So they stopped buying our debt.

2. Once that happened, the value of the dollar tanked like never before. Inflation went crazy because all this paper flooded in, but represented nothing since our production as a society was declining right as the amount of currency was surging. This created a cycle that was very destructive. As the dollar devalued, we had to print more to pay for the things "we" had decided to do, which only further devalued the dollar.

It was ugly and not nearly enough people saw it for what it was.

I am sorry. I am sorry that your future doesn't look anything like mine did at your age. I am sorry that you will spend your life paying for decisions made by the generations before you. I am sorry that by the time your children are born they won't even believe the stories I'll tell them about my childhood, because there won't be anything in those stories they can relate to at all. I'm sorry.

Truth be told, the economic mess was real and lots of people's greed and bad decisions put us in that difficult spot. It was time for change, but the change that came was a double-down on a bad bet and it failed. We didn't want it to fail, but special interests and a different type of greed doomed it to failure before it ever got off the ground.

Sincerely,

Your dad



I'm sure this post annoys a few, or maybe a lot, of you (I'm assuming it will be read by a few people). An I may end up being wrong. I hope that I'm wrong about the outcome and effects of what we're in the middle of doing right now. The problem I'm having is that I can't see how to get around the economic principles that are in play with the enormity of what we're doing. Perhaps I'm over-stating things. Only time will tell. Let me be clear, I do not want bad things to happen, I'm just afraid of what may transpire with the course we are putting ourselves on as a nation right now.