"Average is Officially Over"

I mentioned elsewhere that I have been rather disappointed in the whole "boomer" generation, which is actually the "me first at all costs" generation if you scratch the surface.  I have also mentioned I am reading the book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum titled "That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In The World It Invented and How We Can Come Back".

I am enjoying this book immensely, but that makes it a "slow read" because frankly I need to stop and think/assimilate occasionally.  This book pulls no punches, and it is full of facts and observations about the American experience the last several decades.  One of the most direct is from the chapter titled "This is Our Due" in a section entitled "The War on Math and Physics":

There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything -- low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment -- all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya, Our sense of entitlement expanded far beyond Social Security and Medicare to encompass...well, everything.  

How did this happen?  For one thing Washington DC showed more stupidity than is normal even for that brain-addled burg...of course the worst inhabitants are put there by the American people (paraphrased from the book):

Paul O'Neill (George W. Bush's first Treasury Secretary) warned Vice President Cheney that the growing budget deficits were unsustainable, and the huge tax cuts being pushed by the administration were unaffordable.  Cheney's response?  "You know Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms, this is our due."  A month later, Cheney told the Treasury Secretary to find a new job.

...Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, went on Fox News Sunday [July 11, 2010] and declared -- with no sense of irony at all -- that when Democrats raise spending in one area, the spending needs to be offset by a spending reduction in another area, but when Republicans cut taxes in one area, the cut does not have to be offset by any cut in spending.    [...] In other words, raising spending means that one and one makes two and the deficit grows.  But in the case of lowering taxes without lowering spending, one and one make one: there is no effect on the deficit.

I am getting into the part of the book where the authors map out a plan to fix things, but one very simple statement from the book that we as Americans have to understand and act on sticks in my mind:

"Average is officially over."