The meta-story behind the British election, the Greek meltdown and our
own Tea Party is this: Our parents were “The Greatest Generation,” and
they earned that title by making enormous sacrifices and investments to
build us a world of abundance. My generation, “The Baby Boomers,” turned
out to be what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper
Generation.” We’ve eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.
We baby boomers in America and Western Europe were raised to believe there really was a Tooth Fairy, whose magic would allow conservatives to cut taxes without cutting services and liberals to expand services without raising taxes. The Tooth Fairy did it by printing money, by bogus accounting and by deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising home values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.
Thomas Friedman
