The Tooth Fairy died last night of complications related to obesity, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman solemnly declared Sunday.
Friedman, who identified himself and 400 million others as her survivors, explained:
“Our parents were the ‘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 Anderson called ‘The Grasshopper Generation.’ We’ve eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.
“Now we and our kids together need to become ‘The Regeneration’ — one that raises incomes anew but in a way that is financially and ecologically sustainable. It will take a big adjustment.
“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 accountings and by deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising house values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.
“ … Britain and Greece are today’s poster children for the wrenching new post-Tooth Fairy politics, where baby boomers will have to accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debts tomorrow.
“ … After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.”
Friedman cites David Willetts, a British Conservative candidate, in support of his dire predictions. Willetts has just written a book: “The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future — and how they can give it back.”
OVER DRAMATIC? Probably. Friedman likes to get a reader’s attention. But there is nothing trumped up about the debt crisis in Greece. Cutbacks in public spending there have brought rioters to the streets, throwing rocks and screaming, “Burn it down! That brothel Parliament!” There is nothing phony about the warnings given the people of Britain that deep cuts in public spending there lie immediately ahead. And, yes, America has hard choices to make as the deficit soars and the burden of interest on the public debt becomes mountainous.
We must respond to the recession’s wake-up call. We must stop relying on borrowing to fund our national budget. We must regulate our financial industry so that traders can no longer suck billions out of the economy by selling each other what amounts to wagers on the direction interest rates will take and how entities will manage their debts, pretending they are creating real wealth.
We need a tougher sense of public morality that declares it wrong to have an under-funded pension plan (Social Security, for example) or to make other promises knowing that they cannot be kept. AIG’s credit default swaps, for example, made unkeepable promises that debts would be paid. Selling those promises made brokers and traders billions — and cost American taxpayers billions more to indemnify.
Such reckless, unprincipled manipulating should be criminally wrong. We need, to be brief, to declare that the “let the buyer beware” philosophy is immoral and destructive and opt for an ethical approach to doing the nation’s business.
That Regeneration moral code should also rein in executive pay in the nation’s businesses. It is obscene to pay a CEO 300 times more than the employees who do the work are given. Our income tax laws could and should do away with that obscenity lest we create a wealthy class more powerful than history has ever seen.
FRIEDMAN concludes his provocative essay thusly:
“My takeaway is that U.S. and European politicians — don’t laugh — are going to have to get a lot smarter and more honest. To be the Regeneration, they’ll have to figure how to raise some taxes to increase revenues, while cutting other taxes to stimulate growth; they’ll have to cut some services to save money, while investing in new infrastructure to grow economic capacity.
“We have got to use every dollar wisely now. Because we’ve eaten through our reserves … and because that Tooth Fairy, she be dead.”
