I found this post through the web of the internet and thought it was a rare and clever perspective.

Here is the original post on MySpace

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An Open Letter To Three Preceding Generations

To Whom It May Concern,

I would like to thank the Greatest Generation, The Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers, for providing me with this glorious world I have recently inherited. There are so many of you that by about 2025 people over the age of 55 will probably make up about 1/3 of the country. Soon enough, the Baby Boomers will be retiring and the children of the hippies, Gen X'ers and Generation Yers will be taking the horse by the reins, and we will hopefully lead the country as well as you have. Thanks for the honor, we will make you proud.

Oh wait, I just looked the horse in the mouth, and it might as well be a dead mare, since it comes with an $8.5 TRILLION NATIONAL DEBT, and in New Jersey she comes with an extra $29 BILLION IN STATE DEBT.

It seems to me like you guys threw a big party, made a huge mess, and now you guys are going to be retiring, shipping off to Florida, and leaving us with a huge mess to deal with. A nice analogy for this situation would be that you're leaving me to foot the bill for your life-long kegger. Thanks guys, I only wish I could pay you back, someway, somehow.

Forgive me for being more than a little angry about you guys (as a collective) taking it upon yourselves to make sure you take it easy. After all, let us be honest here, the generation before you survived the Great Depression, fought World War II and the Korean War and made America what it was, and theyre moving out of existence as we speak. The Silent Generation grew up during the great depression and, sat back and enjoyed the post-WWII prosperity. But what can we expect from a generation like the Baby Boomers that has never really had to work for their holdings. You were born into fabulous wealth, the likes of which the world has never seen and lived what became the "American Dream" as many of you lived in plush homes and had hard working parents. You lived in the most stable society in the world with a very firm set of social mores and order. Then, your generation challenged the established order, throwing out the old ways with a new way of doing things, with high tech, high energy, low cost, low effort lives. The boomers survived the Vietnam War and weathered the gas shortages and recessions of the 70s and 80s. You pioneered the disposable society, the fast food nation, basically took the Free Market to a whole different level.

Through all of this, you have all made sure to that you had everything you needed and everything you desired. You made sure that the evil, greedy, power hungry government doesn't get a nickel of YOUR hard earned money. You managed to accomplish this by opposing every measure to raise taxes and by voting out anyone who actually had the utter gall to raise taxes. But you sadly lacked the will, the vision and the energy to do the same for anyone who didn't bother to balance a budget.

I have a real problem with this because in your short sightedness you didn't bother to look down the road to the foreseeable future where you would actually have to pay for those unbalanced budgets. You didn't seem to realize in all of your infinite wisdom that when you borrow money from somebody, you have to pay them back, with considerable interest.

Between 1974 and 1997, the Federal Government ran 23 years of consecutive deficits. If any average American citizen spent more money than he or she earned for 23 years straight, they would be in serious trouble. The same is true for New Jersey, which went more than a decade of without a balanced budget, and now all these many years of poor fiscal management have culminated in new taxes and cuts.

Technically the state and federal government could fix the financial crunch by cutting spending, but God knows you oldsters would never consent to this. You would all be furious as your cars drove over pot holes that would go unfixed, as you waited on even longer lines at the DMV, as your local taxes went up to pay for the lack of State and Federal money that had to be cut to balance the budget. You would be furious about the rise in crime from the lack of available police, the rise in the cost of energy from the lack of government subsidies pouring into corporations, the lack of money going to museums and national parks and you would be more than aggravated about any other cutback in the government service you need. You would all surely be ready to kill if you heard your Social Security would be cut back to deal with the crunch you had tacitly approved of at the polls 20 years ago.

For these reasons, I am furious that you, the preceding generations of Americans, have been so pig-headed and whiney. You have not come up with a solution to the problems you have created and are now set on the fact that you deserve to continue living this charmed life, at my expense, at least until you finish out your lives. You realize the need to spend money, but dont like Governor Corzine's tax hike, which is largely dedicated to dealing with the crushing interest on debt and property tax repulsive as you found Jim Florio's tax hike, which lead to his eviction from Drumthwacket. Such thinking reminds me of Louis XV, the King of France who refused to deal with the distant rumblings of domestic discontentment and famously said, After me, the deluge. His son and daughter-in-law, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, would eventually be beheaded during the French Revolution.

But instead of complaining and not offering a constructive, viable solution to these problems, I will break from the pack, and propose an "Over 40 Tax." I think this is a perfectly reasonable answer to our dilemma. Yes, I know that such a tax targets a certain segment of the population unfairly, but why should I, a young person of 18 with my entire life ahead of me who has only just recently entered the workforce and registered to vote, pay for the mistakes you made when you voted for idiot politicians like Christie Whitman, Jim McGreevey, Ronald Reagan and the two Bush Presidents. These guys (and the lone gal) went off and spent money they didn't have, and you let them. You failed to speak up, or at least didn't speak up loud enough. You let it slide, knowing there would be consequences and I'll be damned if I will be paying many times more in state and federal taxes than you ever did just to pay for your failure to act adequately and finance your Social Security checks so you can sit on a beach in South Florida until you die of living the easy life. Is it too much to ask that you are held accountable for your poor selection of leaders? After all, I seem to remember Ronald Reagan and every other adult telling me for as long as I can remember that life boils down to personal responsibility.

In closing, I feel more upset about the principle and the perceived lack of civic respect you seem to have for your subsequent generations. The whole thing about the money isn't so much the problem as it is the manifestation of the bigger problem: That you didn't take your job as an American citizen seriously. You should all be ashamed of yourselves, as you have been very poor stewards of this country. You have not led, and because of it, your posterity will pay the price for decades to come.

Cool Chart

http://www.uuforum.org/deficit.htm