In his State of the Union Message, 28 January 2003, President Bush said: "We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations." So, who does he think is going to pay for all this? We all know that our posterity will be bearing the brunt of the costs. It will bear upon our children, and our children's children, and our children's children's children, and...

On the television program Adam Smith, aired 8 October 1992, Adam Smith proposed a scenario for the year 1995: "It's 1995 in America and something terrible has happened. You've lost your job. Your company has closed. They've canceled your credit cards and your bank has failed. And the money in your pocket is practically worthless. Why? Because we, the American people, allowed the national debt to go on rising and now it's out of control. ...The coming debt crisis is the one issue that politicians would rather not talk about. Collectively, they produced this terrible mess."

Interviewing two young people who have formed a coalition to prevent further damage to the economic future of the young people, one of the individuals, Rob Nelson, noted: "We're at the beginning of what could become a generational war. Our generation, those that follow us are being denied the opportunity to dream big. We're being denied the resources to invest in our future. We're being left a legacy of debt, and that is a scandal."

John Cowan, another member of the coalition, noted, concerning the present generation: "What they have done is mortgage their children's future and that's nothing less than fiscal child abuse. Four trillion dollars of debt could be $8 trillion of debt in the next 10 years. They've mortgaged our future and it's going to have to stop."

The W. R. Grace Company had aired a rather bleak outlook advertisement depicting the outcome. The scene was an abandoned factory with some bleachers set up inside. Some small children were huddled together; raggedy clothes, old worn out blankets, dirty, bleak faces. Up front was a table set up with a teen-age judge. The prosecutor was a teen-ager also. He was asking the defendant, who was an old man, the question: "And when you saw what was happening, what did you do?" The old man looked out at the children, then hung his head and said: "Nothing".

Has anything changed??? NO! Life goes on…