Danger

We are in the most dangerous period since the 1930’s.  One misstep could threaten the lives of tens of thousands, maybe more.  It is not inconceivable that within the next few days, the world could face its greatest conflagration since WWII.  Only this time, it could unfold over hours, not months, as it did following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

No shots have been fired as of this writing, but the Carl Vinson and a battle group are steaming towards the Korean peninsula.  Kim Jung Un has not conducted a nuclear test (his 6^th) but continues to threaten to do so.  Dear Leader celebrated the founding of the DPRK with a military parade that showed off new ballistic missile hardware.  It tested a submarine based missile launch last year and while there are doubts as to whether he could actually hit the continental US with an ICBM, he is only a few years away from having that ability in the best case scenario.

Here’s why I believe it’s different this time:

·         We’ve tried everything over decades.  Bill Clinton negotiated a deal under which the North Koreans pocketed the concessions and continued on unimpeded.  George W. Bush was too preoccupied with Iraq to do much of anything.  President Obama, not a confrontational sort anyway, tried “strategic patience”  (which, like “leading from behind” is a meaningless, flaccid phrase).  A negotiated solution is no longer available.  If Donald Trump attempted that, he would appear gullible on the world stage.  A Chinese call for a freeze was promptly and justifiably swept away by the Trump Administration.

·         The North Koreans have capability beyond nuclear.   The cyberattack on Sony and cybertheft from major banks have given us a clue about their capabilities in this realm.  Our power grid and perhaps other systems remain vulnerable and the North Koreans know this.  North Korea also has the biological and chemical capabilities that it can marry up with its missile technology and threaten our bases and our allies in the region.   As David Sanger reported in the New York Times a few weeks ago, we have already been at war with Korea for a couple of years in cyberspace.  Many of their missile failures are attributable to U.S. efforts at sabotage.

·         President Obama discontinued our two theater war policy.  From the end of the Second World War to 2010, the military policy of the United States was to maintain readiness to fight two major conflicts simultaneously.   So, for instance, if war broke out on the Korean peninsula, we would still have sufficient troop strength to deter the Russians in Europe.  Obama ended this policy, and we can only fight a major war in one theater (if that, given the Obama depletion of the military).  We have Putin threatening in Europe, troops engaged in  Syria and Afghanistan.   And do not discount the possibility that the North Koreans and Iranians are acting in concert, at least at some level.   With Trump promising to bolster our military, Kim Jung Un may calculate that he will never again have an opportunity like this to face down the United States.

·         The U.S. is as divided as it has been since the Civil War.  In a speech that I attended that was given a few years ago by Dick Gephardt, he noted that what made American democracy special was that election losers accept the outcome.   This is no longer necessarily the case.  The post-election riots in Portland, the “resist” movement, the claim that President Trump is “illegitimate” and that the “election was hacked,” and yesterday’s riots at Berkeley attest to the erosion of our nonviolent transition of power.   The general rule that Americans will rally around the president during wartime is no longer a given.  Kim Jung Un likely sees this condition as an important weakness to exploit.

Most disconcerting is that actual war may be the most rational choice for both of these actors.  John McCain’s statement that Kim Jung Un is a “crazy fat kid,” is wildly incorrect (and unnecessarily provocative).   Just as Obama mischaracterized ISIS as “not Islamic,” the assumption that Kim Jung Un is not a rational actor is likely false.  He may be very rational, given his reality as he sees it.  He is not interested in his people.  He is only interested in perpetuating the iron rule of his family over his country.  He has also seen what happens to dictators that don’t have nuclear weapons.   Muammer Gaddafi, who voluntarily gave up his WMD program, was a particularly poignant lesson for him.   Because past efforts have demonstrated that the regime is willing to cheat, and because he has little else to leverage, Kim Jung Un will never negotiate away his nuclear forces.   Unfortunately, his rationality clashes directly and irresolvably  with America’s.  We have run out of time.  With North Korea’s program nearly able to deliver an ICBM to America, the status quo is no longer acceptable.  Adding to the direct risk is the possibility that North Korea may sell nuclear devices to Iran or some other bad actor.  The Trump Administration cannot sign on to another deal that either preserves the status quo or permits North Korea to cheat once again.

I do not have high hopes for a diplomatic solution, and that is because a permanent solution would not be palatable to the North Koreans.    A bribe for a freeze of the program should not be acceptable to us.  We have already done that.  Any deal that addresses North Korea’s nuclear program must also address their conventional arsenal.   An important aspect of the tension on the Korean peninsula is the North Korean artillery that is trained on Seoul.  Most analysts estimate that civilian casualties would be in the 50,000 range even without a nuclear detonation.   That reality couple with the risk of Chinese assistance has permitted North Korea to adopt a “porcupine strategy,” i.e., you may eat us but it will be so costly to you that you won’t want to.

But the cost curve has shifted.  The cost of doing nothing has gone up dramatically and appears to be rising daily.

Sadly, the elements of an acceptable negotiated solution do not seem to be there.   The odds of a military confrontation are very high.  If the 20^th century taught us anything, it is that war in Asia is a tough, grinding thing.  Asians fight stubbornly.    We have not won a decisive victory in that theater since 1945 and all of the war gaming, scenario planning and modelling that the Pentagon has done says that this one will be the toughest since then.

One of the New Sheriffs in Town

Take a good look.   This is what a woman in a world leadership role  looks like.

While Hillary Clinton is busy running around still blaming misogyny and the Russians for her defeat in November, Nikki Haley is standing up and reasserting America’s moral authority in the world.  She is standing in stark contrast with the women of the prior administration and the prior administration itself.

President Obama spent much of his time in office reducing America’s role in world affairs, offering mea culpas for America’s sins and faults on the world stage.  And of course he filled his inner circle with people that reflected his worldview, like Eric Holder (“America is a nation of cowards”).    Obama’s view was summed up in a single sentence, “there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”   Rarely, if ever, did we hear Obama or his inner circle extol America’s virtues.  There was little talk of a “city on a hill” or “the last best hope on earth.”  The word “freedom” and “liberty” rarely appeared in Obama speeches.

And while he did this consistently through eight years of his administration, our adversaries watched and noticed.    The world noticed when John Kerry cartoonishly announced, “This is what change looks like,” upon the opening of the U.S. embassy in Cuba, with Castro mocking him and announcing that nothing will change in Cuba as they continued to beat the Ladies in White.  The world noticed when Obama turned his back on freedom loving Iranians during the Green Revolution.   The world noticed when Russia marched into a sovereign nation and America failed to lead a concerted effort to repulse the aggression.  And every bad actor took note when Obama drew a “red line” on the use of WMD in Syria and then failed to act, a catastrophic choice that had far reaching ramifications, and even had Obama supporters perplexed.  

Last week changed all that.  A vital player in this drama is Nikki Haley, and she is doing a spectacular job of beginning to articulate and reassert America’s guiding principles.

Haley’s most important job is to articulate new American foreign policy principles for Donald Trump.  

Her first articulated principle is that the UN no longer exists primarily to turn Israel into a piñata.

And last week, she expressed an important  doctrine---THE USE OR THREAT TO USE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION WILL CARRY IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES, WHETHER THEY ARE USED AGAINST A REGIME’S OWN PEOPLE OR THOSE OF OTHER SOVEREIGN NATIONS.   

Haley has been firm, steadfast, and unequivocal.  She announced that the United States would act unilaterally and quickly to respond to the use of WMD by Syria.  And just as important, she quickly rebuffed Bolivia’s attempt to have the UN Security Council meet in closed session, “Any country that chooses to defend the atrocities of the Syrian regime will have to do so in full public view, for the world to hear.”

Her firmness contrasts starkly with her predecessor,  Samantha Power.  I hold Power in particular contempt.   She piously excoriated the United States in her book (which I read cover to cover): A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, in which she claimed that the U.S. was historically slow and timid in its reaction to instances of genocide in the 20^th century.   When she assumed the role of U.N. ambassador there were initial fears that she would lead us to intervene in multiple internecine squabbles across the globe.  Instead she stood mostly mute as ISIS rampaged the Middle East and radical Islam waged genocide against Christendom and the Judaic world.   She will be most remembered for her vote to withhold the U.S. veto of the UN demand to end Israeli settlements.

Nikki Haley has a difficult job of providing the moral and intellectual substance behind the foreign policy of a maverick president and articulating it both to the U.S. and the world.  It appears that she will be unveiling it piece by piece.

Since 9/11, we have grown a bit complacent in our acceptance of weapons of mass destruction.  The nonproliferation regime is fraying.   It’s bad enough that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal, but now North Korea’s is growing and they have made overt threats to us.  With the failure of the Obama/Kerry/Rice deal with Putin with respect to chemical weapons in Syria, we now have reason to be skeptical about the viability of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Samantha Power may have written the book on genocide, but Nikki Haley is doing something about it.  I predict that she may turn out to be the best U.N. ambassador since Jeanne Kirkpatrick.   And I also predict that when things don’t roll her way, she won’t be blaming misogyny.

Austerlitz

Stark, jarring, but subdued, Sergei  Loznita’s documentary,  Austerlitz is a must see for anyone that seeks to comprehend the Holocaust and its impact on the Western world.  It ranks next to Son of Saul as an important film work for serious thinkers and writers about that horrific event.

Austerlitz is appropriately filmed entirely in black and white, and echoes of two previous works—Memory of the Camps, the documentary film co-directed by Alfred Hitchcock and narrated by Trevor Howard that contained the raw black and white footage of film taken during and after the liberation of the camps.  It also is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, by Leni Riefenstahl.

Contrasting with its black and white format, the film opens on what appears to be a beautiful, sunny summer day with throngs of visitors and tourists streaming into the sites of the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, in Germany, just as if they were entering into the San Diego Zoo or the Art institute of Chicago.   They are young and old, from a variety of countries, some sporting New York Yankees baseball caps, wearing t-shirts with “Jurassic Park,” or, almost obscenely,  “Cool Story, Bro.”  As the throng of visitors stream past the wrought iron gate like a river, marked with the ominous words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” one cannot help but think that over 70 years ago, innocent people just like these tourists similarly streamed into the camps but never left.

This unusual film has no narration at all (except the occasional docents conducting guided tours of the facility of torment and death), no dialogue, no music, and no historical footage or background,  but consists solely of an eye level view of the visitors to the camp (now a museum).   You are simply provided the perspective that a security guard might have on an ordinary day at the camp/museum grounds.  Most of the background noise is the shuffling of feet and murmuring of the crowds.  You are a people watcher in this solemn place.  You spend much of the film’s 90 minutes observing the facial emotional reactions of the visitors to this monument to inhumanity.  People wander through the barracks, on the grounds, and in a room where one assumes hideous human experiments were performed.   The only sparse narration is provided by the docents providing guided tours that you overhear that are punctuated by words like “extermination,” “screams,” “no hope.”

While most of the visitors treat the camp with the solemnity the site demands, there are some—especially some of the younger people that act with irreverence.   Several times visitors have to be reminded of places they are not to step, or where it is appropriate and not appropriate to each lunch (begging the question of who could actually have sufficient appetite to eat in this place).   Of course, everyone has a camera or a video recorder and several people are taking selfies, the act of which seems to defile this hallowed place.  Some sequences rattle the soul.  One fellow has his girlfriend take a picture of him in front of the large poles where prisoners were strung up and tortured as he crosses his arms over his head almost in mockery.   In another sequence that makes you grimace, a young woman has her boyfriend take her smiling photo in front of the crematorium. 

Still, there are other sequences—and mostly they are focused on some of the older visitors—where the people are appropriately horrified and revulsed by this monument to industrialization of death that the Nazi regime perpetrated.   You can see the anguished looks on their faces as they attempt to process the magnitude of the Nazi horror.

Austerlitz is a unique and powerful film.  It is meant to be a warning.  Yes, young people are often oblivious to propriety and demands of solemnity, but the film clearly that time has diminished the human horror of the events that occurred at this place, especially for the millenials.   As the Holocaust survivors die off, and their firsthand accounts of the Nazi genocide begin to fall silent, sacred places like Sachsenhausen become as emotionally remote to the next generation as a trip to the mummy exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is to us.  The “never again,” cry has gone unheeded since in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Iraq and Syria by ISIS, although those horrors were not on the magnitude of the Third Reich. 

Almost as if deigned by Providence, a cold, blustery, miserable March rain began to fall as I left the theater.   I pulled my cap down and tugged my coat tightly around my hunched shoulders and walked the three blocks alone, silently, in the chilly, dark mist to my car and wondered whether and when this may happen again.

  

Trans-confusion

For all the hysteria over Donald Trump’s “misogyny,” it turns out that the real attack on women’s rights may not be coming from the Right but from the Left. 

In my last post, I discussed the apparent disconnect between the Nike promotion of its Pro Sport hijab and the reaction of real women competitors to the hijab.

But the absurdities have reached entirely new levels under Title IX.  Underpinning the zeal to protect transgender individuals (an extremely rare condition – 0.3 percent of the population or 700,000 individuals) is the leftist narrative that gender is only a social construct, that it is, at core a consequence of a patriarchal society.  All one has to do is self-identify as your gender of choice and you become that choice.  Saying it makes it so in this new world order.

Rather than permit individual states or school districts to set policies as they saw fit, the federal government dictated and coerced schools into permitting transgendered students to use women’s locker and shower facilities.  Sweeping aside the privacy rights of girls and young women, the rights of 99.7 percent of the population were subordinated to the needs of .3 percent without discussion or vote.   Anyone that pushed back against this mandate was labelled “homophobic” or “transphobic.”

Last summer, I attended a presentation of a PhD candidate whose work demonstrated that the single biggest factor in whether young girls stay in school or not in India is whether they have access to private, girls only bathroom facilities, especially as they begin menstruating.  Girls need personal privacy—especially at that age when their bodies are undergoing transformation.  As written, the Obama administration guidelines would subject these girls to having their personal privacy invaded by boys and even adults that have male genitals.  Given the time athletes spend in locker rooms, the Obama  directive would likely reduce the incentive for girls to participate in sports.

But now women’s sports in general are at risk, and that would be a tragic and perverse consequence of the leftist agenda.

Girl’s and women’s’ sports have made tremendous strides in the past three and a half decades.   Just 33 years ago the first women’s marathon was won by Joan Benoit.  Professional women’s leagues have been established in several sports.  The quality of play, training, quality of coaches,  and access to facilities and coaching has exploded across several sports and at every level.    A girls’ basketball game at the high school level at a quality program looks nothing like the game played a generation ago.  The girls are so much more highly skilled, better trained, and better coached.  Yes, there is still a large pay gap at the professional level, but opportunities  to compete and excel  are way beyond  anything that existed a couple of decades ago.  At elite high school programs such as exist where I live, girls will not be able to make the local high school team unless they have played travel basketball for several years.

And the Left is about to trash it all.

By permitting biological males or women that are undergoing hormone treatments to compete with women, we are now putting all this progress at risk.   Why bother competing at high levels when a male that either self-identifies as a woman or a girl that is undergoing hormone treatment can waltz in and take away the opportunity to be champion?

The reality is that even though Title IX, along with other social factors have propelled womens’ sports, and the performance gap has narrowed, women probably will never be able to compete with men in any sport at the elite level.  Not in baseball, golf, basketball, hockey, track and field or even chess.  There is a reason that separation of sexes needs to be maintained.

• ·         The Texas state girls wrestling championship was won by a girl that was transitioning to a boy and undergoing hormone treatment.
•  ·  A New Zealand weightlifter that had formerly competed as a man won the Australian International Weightlifting competition as a woman.

We can expect much more of this in the future.  Permitting transgender athletes to compete in women’s divisions is a direct threat to women’s athletics.  Why reach for the ring when it cannot be reached?    It is simply not fair to distort the competitive field for 99% + of girls and women that want to compete on an even keel.

It is bad enough that girls would be subject to biological men in their locker rooms. 

The Left is pushing to take a statute that was passed to promulgate and promote women’s athletics, and will twist and pervert it so as to destroy women’s sports.  Title IX, passed to open the door for women’s sports is now being used to slam it shut again.  Sports governing bodies need to look hard at their rules and tighten eligibility to ensure that girls and women don’t have their sports dominated by the trans-athletes.   With all this talk of white privilege coming from the left, female athletes may be falling victim to trans privilege in athletics.

Hijab Hysteria

Last September, I had lunch with an old friend of mine at a combination diner/grocery store kind of place. It was brilliant and warm afternoon, but not too humid,  in the high 80’s—warm enough so that sweat formed on your glass of iced tea.  As we chatted and watched people going in and out, loading groceries in their cars, I spotted a woman in a full length black burka with her two toddlers headed out to the car to pack her car.  Her burka was full length black with only the tiniest slit out of which she could see.    She reminded me of one of those large black Hefty contractor bags.  My reaction was mixed—first, pity for this woman that undoubtedly was suffering in this stifling heat under this suffocating costume, when she should have been in shorts and a t-shirt or a sun dress, and second, irritation at a misogynist culture that either coerces her to dress like this, or so indoctrinates her that she feels compelled to do this, when her husband, no doubt is free to dress as he pleases.   It was so out of place in Western society.

I wrote a post in support of U.S. Chess Champion Nazi Paikidze-Barnes, who is skipped the World Chess Championships that were held in Tehran.  Ms. Paikidze-Barnes refuses to wear a hijab, which is mandatory under Iranian law.  “I will NOT wear hijab and support women’s oppression.  Even if it means  missing one of the most important competitions my career,” she told the New York  . Her boycott was also supported by leaders of the Muslim Reform Movement, Masih  Alinejad and Asra  Nomani and was described as a “welcome departure from a pervasive hijab fetish, which romanticizes and normalizes the hijab,” which they describe as a “symbol of sexism, misogyny and purity culture.”

Now along comes Nike, promoting its Nike Pro Hijab, aimed at a tiny segment of competitive athletes-Muslim women.  I’m not privy to Nike’s projections but I strongly suspect this line of clothing is more a political statement than a financial one for Nike.   Of course, the announcement was cheered by the Left (you know, the same folks that were celebrating the women’s march and Linda Sarsour, teaching American women to tie a hijab as a statement of “choice”).

But even if that is the case, large numbers of women (and men) DO see the hijab as a symbol of oppression (and the burka even worse).    Why would Nike promote something that is seen as such?  Similarly the Confederate flag is seen as a symbol of oppression of blacks, but is simultaneously seen as a symbol of Southern pride and independence by large numbers of nonracist Southerners.  Would Nike ever dare to promote a “stars and bars” summer golf wear line?   What then is the difference between these symbols?   We widely condemned the display of the Confederate flag.   Are we now fine with hijabs and burkas?

Which leaves us with a question that my friends on the Left refuse to answer.   Do the U.S. women’s chess players have an incorrect view or does Nike?  They cannot both be right.  

I continue to stand with Ms. Paikidze-Barnes.  My next driver won’t be a Nike.  It will be a TaylorMade.

Credibility

A significant factor in Donald Trump’s electoral victory was his straight talking, blunt style and his successful portrayal of Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”   The revelations that classified emails turned up on her personal server despite her denials, her purposeful permanent destruction of 30,000 other emails, her denial that she was influence peddling through the Clinton Foundation (foreign donations immediately dried up following the election), her obvious  untruths about Beghazi all added up to a leader that could not be straight with the American people.

Likewise, Barack Obama himself or through surrogates mislead, prevaricated or asserted things that turned out not to be true on several important issues.  ISIS is the J.V.  ISIS is contained.  Bowie Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction.” The pallets of cash were not a ransom payment.   Iran will be subject to “snap back” sanctions and “anytime, anywhere” inspections.   Of course, Obama most famously declared that, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and that the average family would save $2,500 when he peddled the [Un]Affordable Care Act.

George W. Bush waged a preventive war in Iraq that cost 4,000 lives and wounded 30,000 others and was a source of turmoil across the Middle East.  The basis of that action was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was actively expanding its capacity, possibly going nuclear.  Now, this judgment was not countered by the intelligence agencies of other countries, but it was still tragically wrong.  And it had far reaching consequences.  I cringed when George Bush, in an awkward effort to make light of it, pulled the skirt up at a table at a state dinner and said, “I know they’re in here somewhere.”   Not funny, George.

Bill Clinton famously declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Americans are a tough, resilient people that have great capacity to sacrifice greatly for a just cause.  But we have now had a series of presidents or candidates that declared things to be true that either were not true at the time those things were said or later turned out not to be.

Now Donald Trump, in a Twitterburst accused Barack Obama of wiretapping him without offering any hard evidence to support his claim.  I understand that Democrats have  accused him of colluding with the Russians without offering any hard evidence.  They were able to destroy Michael Flynn without any and have tried the same with Jeff Sessions.   

Trump, ever the counterpuncher, fired back with these accusations and Obama and those on the left reacted with their standard indignancy, calling on him to provide hard evidence to prove it.  The accusations, if true, would be the biggest scandal since Watergate.   Obama immediately issued a statement denying he had ordered a wiretap on Trump (but tellingly did not deny that a wiretap had occurred).  

Trump will have enormous obstacles to overcome, even if true.  Obama has learned how to deploy layered defenses from the Clinton camp.   First will come the denials, “Not a smidgen of corruption,” “just a guy in the neighborhood,” “I heard about it like everyone else—from the newspapers.”  When that doesn’t go away, blame the underlings, “it was a rogue office in Kansas City.”   Then, stall, stall, stall and resist the release of documents and emails until the public loses interest.   These defenses worked well with Fast and Furious and the IRS targeting of conservative groups (we are just NOW receiving admissions from the IRS that they have 7,000 relevant documents).

We can expect the same game plan this time.

But if Trump wants to lead, he HAS to be better.  After three straight presidents and a Secretary of State and presidential candidate that had severe credibility problems, Americans are hungry for leadership that will be straight with us.  We need someone that we can bank on and have a high degree of confidence that we are being told the truth.  Trump needs to back this up with at least some hard evidence, and soon.  The stakes are too high now.  

The Legacy

President Trump gave a magnificent speech last week, probably the strongest speech before Congress since Ronald Reagan, perhaps even better.   He was well coached, the tone was uplifting and optimistic, and it contained none of the usual Trumpist colloquialisms like “believe me.”   He talked about job creation, border control, rebuilding the military, and strengthening education.

Democrats Keith Ellison and Debbie Wasserman Schultz made fools of themselves by remaining seated when Trump honored the widow of fallen Navy SEAL  Ryan Owens.  Nancy Pelosi looked like she was having kidney stones.  The Democratic response was delivered by former Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear, who looked like some tired old career Ace Hardware floor salesman that delivered standard Democratic boilerplate that didn’t even match Trump’s speech.  Even Van Jones admitted that Trump had come into his own and said that if he keeps doing this, he will be in office for eight years.

He addressed a number of high priority issues, but omitted an important one---debt.  He was, and has been, more focused on our trade deficit than our fiscal deficit and debt, and that, I believe, is misplaced.

The past few years have seen a surge in social stress and tension, putatively over race, gender, class, ethnicity, even bathroom use.   But any justification of those frictions pale in comparison with a schism that has been rarely spoken or written about---generational.

The basis of the American dream is that no matter what indignities or traumas you have suffered, no matter how exhausting, tedious, or inconsequential your feel your own life may be, you can trudge off to work, lunch bucket in hand with the knowledge that you are providing an opportunity for your children to have a better life and greater opportunity.

Our generation and the immediately preceding generation have  done precisely the opposite.  We have done it with debt.  We have burdened these kids with enormous amounts of the stuff on every level.  And none of us can escape this ugly reality.  We elected politicians over the last 50 years that overtly and sometimes surreptitiously stole from them so that we could consume things today.

That is the constraint Mr. Trump has to deal with and  has yet to speak to.

On the national level, we are about to click over the $20 trillion dollar mark, and that is a debt burden being managed with historically low interest rates.  The State of Illinois has $11 billion in unpaid bills and $130 billion in pension obligations. The City of Chicago has  $33 billion of debt and pension obligations.  The Chicago Public School system has $11 billion—20% of its budget goes to servicing debt and paying pension obligations. 

But wait, there’s more.  Pre-housing crisis,  much of college tuition was being funded by mommy and daddy’s home equity lines of credit.  Now that home equity has evaporated, student loan debt is soaring.   We took that debt from mom’s and dad’s balance sheet and put it on to the kids’ balance sheets.   And this occurrence is a direct result of policies that our politicians set in motion.

Think about what we have done to these kids.  Let it sink in.  We voted for politicians that enabled this to happen, and we didn’t pay enough attention to what they were doing.   They created incentives for people to borrow money and keep buying bigger and bigger houses and borrow to do it, whether or not you thought you could pay it back and punished financial institutions or threatened to if they didn’t lend.  Now the escalating college costs are piling up on the balance sheets of young people.

We’re telling this younger generation  about the American Dream and yet it’s as if we’ve asked them to swim across the English Channel but putting 20 pound weights in each hand.  To add insult, in the near future we will be demanding that they not only pay the debt we incurred but change our diapers, feed us, and walk us in the park.

Our forebears left us with a vibrant, growing country piloted by a functioning democracy.   We’re leaving our children with an enormous mountain of debt on multiple levels.    Yet few are talking about it.  It wasn’t even discussed in any serious way during the election.

The only real attempt to address debt was the Bowles Simpson Commission-the best idea to come out of the Obama Administration.  Bowles Simpson was the bipartisan commission that came up with a compromise plan, a mix of revenues and spending cuts that were to address the deficit.  It was a solid plan, and, of course, it contained items unpopular with both the left and the right.  Obama promptly smothered that baby in its crib and we haven’t had any serious efforts at it since.  

Now along comes Donald Trump, who has announced that he wants to substantially increase military spending (needed, in my view), spend a trillion plus on infrastructure (I predict that he will get this done with little resistance; Congress LOVES to spend money), cut corporate taxes and individual taxes.    I simply do not see how the math works, especially with interest rates forecasted to rise by at least 75 basis points this year alone.   Only Alan Simpson and David Stockman (admittedly cranky guys) are sounding the alarm at the moment.   

Debt at all these levels is suffocating our young.  In his book House of Debt, Amir Sufi notes, “Debt is a harsh instrument.”   Likewise, foreign policy expert  Richard Haass warning of far reaching implications for our inability to deal with our debt, observes in his new book, A World In Disarray,  “The strategic consequence of growing indebtedness are many and worrisome.  The need to finance the debt will absorb an ever increasing number of dollars and an ever increasing share of the U.S. budget…..Mounting debt will raise questions around the world about the United States.  U.S. inability to deal with its debt challenge will detract from the appeal of the American political and economic model.”  Excess debt is constraining, confining and limits options, whether it is an individual, a corporation, a state, or a nation.  It hands at least some control over your destiny to others.

The trends appearing in our younger generation are not encouraging.  Marriage rates among them are down.  They are less mobile.  They are not buying houses.  Birth rates are down (a recent article addressing this phenomena was entitled, “Make America Mate Again”).  Most troubling to me is that they are less entrepreneurial and about half as likely to start a business as a generation before.   

I suspect that this big overhang of debt at every level has a lot to do with it.  These trends are symptomatic.  We have effectively turned them into our slaves.  We continue to demand that they turn over a larger and larger share of their earnings to pay debts that we incurred or that we pushed onto them.  And I believe that it has a role to play in the social resentments that are bubbling to the surface.   We’re genetically programmed not to be resentful of our forefathers and mothers, our parents and grandparents.  It’s easier to be resentful of someone that is of a different race, gender, class or whatnot.   The more justified  anger and resentment should be leveled at those that spent their money and handed them the bill.

Yes, we saw a different Donald Trump address Congress; he struck a different tone and had some interesting things to say.  He referred to the approaching 250^th birthday of our nation in nine short years.  But he failed to address a large aspect of the legacy we will leave our children on our nation’s 250^th birthday.  If they are to thrive and prosper, it cannot be a legacy of debt.