Where are the Millenials - and their parents?

There is a serious crisis looming for the Millenials (people in their teens and twenties), but most of them seem oblivious.

Our exploding federal debt and the financial woes of Social Security and Medicare (though the health care reform helped this a bit) threaten to doom my kids and others of their generation to a bleak economic future.  Left unchecked, current trends will leave them with much higher income taxes to merely pay the interest on our debt while at the same time having fewer jobs and lower wages because our country can't afford to fix/improve education and infrastructure.  Moreover, if waiting to fix Social Security and Medicare results in draconian benefit cuts down the road, our kids will have to spend more of their money taking care of us, their parents.  Yikes!  My generation is on course to be the first in over a century to leave our kids with fewer opportunities and a lower standard of living than we had.

Now, one of the problems in tackling this issue is that, right now, we actually need to spend and borrow more to make sure the fragile economic recovery takes hold.  If we don't, the deficit will soar even more as the economy tanks and tax revenues evaporate.  We need a solid economic recovery to create jobs, which will raise tax revenues and make it easier to get our fiscal house in order.

There are some Millenials who get it - like We Have POWER Now (http://wehavepowernow.org). But more need to join their cause - NOW!  And we, their parents, need to join forces, too, to force our elected leaders to have some guts and make the tough but smart choices.  It means having clear priorities and, ultimately, it means paying slightly higher taxes and, once the current economic crisis has passed,  reigning in spending so our kids won't face astronomically higher taxes for a crippled government in a stagnant economy.  It's called being the responsible adults.