BACK in the salad days of Gen X, when Ethan, Winona and Janeane took to the silver screen to whinge about divorce, AIDS and McJobs, it was often heard that ours would be the first generation in American history to fare worse than our parents'. When this ominous forecast of generational decline first found my ears, I refused to believe it. My faith in America's free-enterprise system was boundless. That is, if America continued to exist at all! An early-90s collaborative hypertext fiction listserv to which I belonged envisioned our future on the borderless virtual frontier as a disembodied anarchy of infinite freedom and endless innovation in which the laws of conventional economics would be suspended. The American state would become a minor protective-services franchise, as envisioned in "Snow Crash", since income would become untraceable and untaxable, thanks to Peter Thiel. Also, for some reason or other, we would have access to unlimited quantities of LSD, and Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson would stop by our temporary autonomous zone and regale us with tales of worlds beyond the world as a roaring bonfire of discarded Douglas Coupland novels licked the smudged night sky like the forked tongues of a million lizards. This did not come to pass.

Nevertheless, the Clinton-era boom and the rise of a rather less fantastic internet economy laid to rest fears of Gen X's waning fortunes, and my cohort went forth into a sunlit world of stock options, companionate marriages and Netflix marathons. But then, cruel fate, it finally came to pass that Ethan, Winona, Janeane and Ben were more or less vindicated. Reality does bite. We are suffering a great stagnation. Where once I saw pathetic hand-wringing, now I see a venerable American rite of passage. Every generation must contemplate the dread prospect of faring worse than the preceding. (Logically, a few generations hence, the kids will be eating locusts and killing in cold blood for 40-year-old cans of Fancy Feast, but look away, reader, before the abyss looks also into you.) What is your glitch, America? 

This unpleasant reverie comes to you courtesy of Matt Miller, who last week upheld this proud American tradition by reminding the under-35 set that:

As many as 100 million Americans live in households today that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. And this is happening well before we feel the full impact of global economic integration with rising economies like India and China.

According to Mr Miller, college costs too much, college grads are crushed by their student loans, the public schools produce mediocrity instead of mobility, America's economically-vital infrastructure is falling down, and nothing much is being done about any of it. Why not? Old people!  

Add it up, and what's it all mean? Younger Americans don't realize they're coming of age in an era in which both parties have pre-committed virtually all public resources to seniors. They'll inherit a government without the cash or flexibility to address emerging non-elderly needs—choices that should be every generation's birthright. Want to help a poor child or fix a bridge? Sorry, kids, the till is empty.

Not fair! So what's to be done? Ice floes? Death panels? Mr Miller offers this instructive tale:

In 1995, when I was a (younger) generational equity worrywart, I asked then-Sen. Alan Simpson how to fix what was clearly coming. Simpson told me nothing would change until someone like me could walk into his office and say, “I'm from the American Association of Young People. We have 30 million members, and we're watching you, Simpson. You [mess with] us and we'll take you out.”

Simpson was right then. He's still right now.

What?! That's it? The best last hope for America's 20-somethings is the "American Association of Young People"? That's not the most depressing thing I've ever heard, but it's close.

Mr Miller seems to me to overestimate the extent to which the prospects of rising generations depend on government spending. I would emphasise that American prospects generally depend on a return to healthy rates of economic growth, and that's not entirely or even primarily a matter of taxpayer-financed "investment" in America's human capital and physical infrastructure. That said, the economy certainly won't break out of its rut if an increasingly huge portion of GDP is consumed by health care and old-age pensions. So Mr Miller is right to suggest, as he does, that younger Americans will have little to look forward to unless it becomes politically possible to end Medicare and Social Security as we know them. But, again, how can this become possible?

The answer is... the answer is: I don't know. Oh wait: I do know. The answer is by refusing en masse, AAYP or not, to concede that a major overhaul of entitlements is somehow mean-spirited, and instead insisting that it is an utter necessity of collective prudence and generational equity. My generation and these "Millennial" youngsters both are going to have to stop being so sensitive about appearing stingy and insist that we get a fair shake, too. Listen to Winona, kids. If you ever manage to get a revolution going, don't disembowel it for a pair of running shoes, or for a pat on the head from the AARP.

(Photo credit: The Picture Desk)