In Ireland, higher education and technical schools are free for first-time graduates, and as a result the Irish workforce is highly educated. In part, this helps explain why Ireland has led the member states of the European Union in economic growth, earning the nickname Celtic Tiger.\ Contrast that with the United States, where young people graduate from college with increasingly burdensome debt.
Moreover, the United States had an official trade deficit of $805 billion last year. Why the difference between the Irish and U.S. models? Well, since 1992 the United States has been governed by the political representatives of the baby boomer generation. And the baby boomer generation has so far proven especially irresponsible in terms of governance—which essentially means it will be up to ours or later generations to fix many of the problems this country faces.
The baby boomers have been in charge since Clinton arrived in office in 1993. President Clinton, however, reduced deficits and was responsible in terms of governance even if he was not so in his private life. The same cannot be said of those other boomers, the Congressional GOP. After taking the House and Senate in 1994, they wasted manpower and millions of tax payer dollars hypocritically and cynically investigating a real estate deal of 1978 where the president was himself bilked (Whitewater) and, more famously, the president's embarrassing adultery (the Lewinsky scandal).
The GOP of the 21st Century has been even more wasteful: Giving away tax breaks that are in essence subsidies to Exxon, whose CEO made $190,915 per day last year; running up the public debt of the United States to $7.9 trillion in 2005 and weakening the dollar abroad; launching an unnecessary war that is itself immensely costly (now $10 billion per month) and wasteful of life (nearly 2,400 dead Americans and an unknown number of dead Iraqis).
These old men (and women) profit in the short term from highly destructive governance, yet see no long-term consequences because the burden has been passed off to us—the $7.9 trillion public debt of 2005 amounts to $26,823 per U.S. citizen, and in all probability the baby boomer generation will be gone by the time that debt is eliminated. Moreover, a by-product of baby boomer incompetence is that they are too narrow minded to deal with glaring problems ranging from poverty and racism to more bourgeois concerns such as the state of higher education.
""The Bank of Mom and Dad,"" an April 20 article in The New York Times, pointed out that since young people now leave college with an average of $20,000 in debt, one of every three people between the ages of 18 and 34 receives annual cash from their parents. For comparison, in 1997 average undergraduate debt was $11,400.
According to a Feb. 1, 2006 National Law Journal article, the average loan debt for a graduate of a public law school is $48,910, while that for a graduate from a private law school is $76,763. Such huge debt burdens mean many young lawyers cannot go into public service or other low-paying, idealistic sectors of law practice and maintain a comfortable middle class lifestyle. And medical students are no better off, averaging nearly $100,000 in debt, though this is mitigated slightly because doctors can expect to make on average more money than lawyers.
It may be charged that the current plight of the United States is instead determined by inevitable historical forces, and that might be true in some ways. But if abstract social and economic forces were completely determinative, Ireland would not be the ""Celtic Tiger"" of Europe. Ireland's leadership and people eventually made a decision to end their war and regenerate their country. Likewise, our current plight is in large part the result of conscious decisions.
Basically, the baby boomer generation has failed the more youthful generations of this country. This isn't true across the board—one part of the baby boomer generation helped to destroy Jim Crow and to end the Vietnam War. Moreover, the baby boomers raised us. Yet the other part of the baby boomer generation, in fact the larger part, has found ultimate expression in backlash, anger, paranoia, anxiety and fear—and the selfish and reactionary politics and policies of today are the result. Hopefully we will be different than our parents.
Teddy O'Reilly is a senior majoring in international studies. His column runs every Wednesday in The Daily Cardinal. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
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