Sure the 1920s may have a hard time explaining their love of mah-jongg, the 50s would need to make clear why poodle skirts were in fashion, and the 70s should clarify why pet rocks and Sea Monkeys were ever considered cool.

But surely they all have a better explanation that we have for planking, or better yet, Rickrolling someone.

And yet the absurdity of our federal government somehow manages to make today’s internet memes seem downright sane by comparison. Since Democrats have taken the reins in Washington the government continues to grow, but in ways that make less and less sense.

Take Dodd-Frank as an example. Following the economic collapse of 2007, most everyone agreed that some level of reform was needed in the financial sector to attempt to prevent a similar crisis from happening in the future. The Democrats’ solution, best known by its two primary authors Dodd-Frank, doesn’t really address the very visible problems. Rather than eliminate, it enshrined “too big to fail,” and rather than reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it left them completely alone.

Rather than reform we got more government. A lot more government.

The bill spans 848 pages, but not even that properly reflects its true length. For instance, the “Volcker Rule” that bans restricts proprietary trading, only takes up 11 pages of the law, but the five federal agencies charged to enact it issued a 298 page proposal. For the sake of comparison, The Economist found that “the law that set up America’s banking system in 1965 ran to 29 pages; the Federal Reserve of 1913 went to 32 pages; the Banking Act that transformed finance after the Wall Street Crash, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act, spread out to 37 pages.”

To be fair, length is only one, rather crude way to measure its impact on the economy. But the point is, Dodd-Frank, as well as other recent legislation (the 2,000 pages Obamacare bill chief among them) threaten to stifle the economy with so many overlapping rules, red tape, and regulations that businesses won’t know which way is up.

In the Democrats quest to constantly do something, they’ve created a Washington monster that feeds on its citizens. Rather than stop and take a moment to actually identify a problem, establish what government break-down led to the problem, and then take limited steps to address it, Democrats simply tack on some additional bureaucracy or create some new regulatory agency and call the problem solved.

A similar trend can be seen in the tax code where something that should fit on a postcard has grown so large that no one really knows just how big it is (most estimates are around 7 million words spanning roughly 9,500 pages).

Such complexity has real consequences. Take next January as a prime example. As the Washington Post reports:

“On Dec. 31, the George W. Bush-era tax cuts are scheduled to expire, raising tax rates on investment income, estates and gifts, and earnings at all levels. Overnight, the marriage penalty for joint filers will spring back to life, the value of the child tax credit will drop from $1,000 to $500, and the rate everyone pays on the first $8,700 of wages will jump from 10 to 1 percent.

The Social Security payroll tax will pop back up to 6.2 percent from the 4.2 percent under the deal approved Friday by Congress. And new Medicare taxes enacted as part of President Obama’s health-care initiative will for the first time strike high-income households.”

And all of it would come at a crucial time for our nation’s fragile economy. This is not a tax code that looks like it was designed on purpose. It’s a hodgepodge of rules that have been piled one on top of the other until any sense of original purpose was lost.

Meme’s may be difficult to explain, but at least there is some humor in trying. The Democrats recent policies, coupled with their aversion to reform, is impossible to explain, and truly frustrating to try.

Here’s Mr. Head in the Sand himself, Paul Krugman, explaining just how silly all of this austerity is.

“[I]n early 2010 austerity economics – the insistence that government should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment – became all the rage in European capitals.

. . . Now the results are in – and they’re exactly what three generations worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. . . None of the countries slashing spending have seen the private-sector surge.”

It’s an argument that conveniently leaves out one of the most important variables – enormous deficits, incurred because of profligate governments and overgenerous social welfare programs, was the reason for the policy choices that came next.

There is no austerity without unsustainable budgeting.

Krugman’s argument is the logical equivalent of buying a house you can’t afford, losing your job, being forced to cut back on other expenditures in order to make your mortgage payment, and then telling your creditors, “I know, I know, I should have really built that extra wing onto the house I couldn’t afford.”

The spending that many of the most troubled European nations racked up is astounding. Greece has a government debt to GDP ratio of 142.8 percent, followed by Italy at 119 percent, Ireland at 96.2 percent, Portugal at 93 percent, and France at 81.7 percent.

The history of Greek debt is particularly illuminating. Their flirtation with default is nothing new. Indeed, prior to joining the Euro, its public debt was already more than 100 percent of GDP and it’s interest rates neared 17 percent (higher than they are today). But after joining the Euro, the nation’s bond prices, and therefore cost of borrowing, plummeted. Their economy grew, but as The Economist describes it was all a mirage.

“Lower interest rates spurred a spending surge. The economy grew by an average of 4% a year until 2008. But strong GDP growth masked the underlying weakness of the public finances. The public-debt ratio fell, but only because GDP in cash terms grew more quickly than debt. Large budget deficits continued. Once it was safely inside the Euro, indeed, Greece relaxed its fiscal grip.”

With no impetus for reform the government’s spending habits spun out of control. Government workers were able to retire as early as age 58 and receive 80 percent of their basic salary. An incredible bonus system that gave workers extra money for things as commonplace as using a computer and arriving for work on time enriched government workers at the hands of the private sector. The size of the federal workforce grew to the point where one in three Greeks works for the government. And an onerous regulatory system marred by corrupt bureaucracy created a shadow economy that reduced revenue.

Greece was fundamentally broken. Does Paul Krugman really believe that it shouldn’t be fixed? Because Greece already tried that, and while it papered over unsustainable habits for a while, it ultimately only delayed and deepened the inevitable pain.

To be sure the austerity that is now being demanded of Greece is agonizing. But that is not a reason to stray from the course. Milton Friedman explained why through the analogy of an alcoholic,

“The cure for alcoholism is simple to state: stop drinking. It is hard to take because, this time, the bad effects come first, the good effects come later. The alcoholic who goes on the wagon suffers severe withdrawal pains before he emerges in the happy land of no longer having an almost irresistible desire for another drink.”

Of course the better path is simply to not become an alcoholic from the start. That advice may come too late for Europe, but policymakers in the United States should take heed. Smart reforms now preclude the need for blunt austerity later.

The problem is it’s wrong.

A more apt title would have been “A Deficit Assured to Last,” because despite record tax increases Obama’s budget would never balance. As in ever.

The reason is political cowardice. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the primary driver of our deficit in the coming years is continual growth in the cost of government entitlements and the rising interest payments that result. In 1975 spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid made up 27 percent of all government spending. Today that same figure is 46 percent. Moreover, it’s only projected to get worse.

“Under CBO’s two scenarios, all of the projected growth in primary spending as a share of GDP over the long term stems from increases in mandatory spending, particularly in outlays for the government’s major health care programs: Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and insurance subsidies that will be provided through the exchanges created by [Obamacare],” the CBO wrote in its most recent Long Term Budget Outlook.

Given their status as the most important budgetary items in terms of deficit impact you’d think they would figure prominently in the President’s budget. You’d be wrong. Indeed, Obama hardly mentioned them and made almost no changes to their long-term trajectory.

The reason is simple. Entitlements are considered to be the “third rail” or “sacred cow” of Washington. Politicians don’t touch them because it risks backlash with voters who benefit from the programs.

This is fundamentally dishonest. Without change, the government programs that people have come to rely on will inevitably be weakened. As deficits become more unsustainable and programmatic trust funds run dry entitlement benefits will have to be cut, taxes will have to dramatically increase, or some combination of the two. And the longer we wait the more dramatic (read: painful) those changes will have to be.

It is not as if the Obama Administration is blissfully unaware of all of this.

During congressional testimony last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted that Obama’s budget would result in untenable fiscal burdens on future generations.

“Even if Congress were to enact this budget, we would be left with – in the outer decades as millions of Americans retire – what are still unsustainable commitments in Medicare and Medicaid,” he said.

What is all the more amazing is that Geithner said almost the exact same thing in testimony last year.

“With the presidents plan, even if Congress were to enact it, and even if Congress were to hold to it, we would still be left with a very large interest burden and unsustainable obligations over time, “Geithner said in 2011.

In other words, President Obama was made aware by a member of his Cabinet, a man that he fought to keep in his inner economic circle despite letting everyone else go, that his last budget wouldn’t solve the fundamental economic problem that America faces. And then, given an entire year to ruminate on the matter and come up with some solutions, he punts…again. And what’s worse, he sells it to the public with the tagline “an economy built to last.”

More like an “economy doomed for last.”

When Democrats were attempting to sell the bill to the public they insisted that the individual mandate (the requirement that everyone must either obtain health insurance or pay a penalty) was not a tax. In a 2009 interview with George Stephanopoulos, Obama attempted to refute the argument that this portion of the bill violated his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000.

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama said in the interview.  “You just can’t make up that language and call it a tax increase. . .  I absolutely reject that notion.”

But after it passed the Obama Administration began to change its tune. Realizing that it was going to face a constitutional challenge the Obama team felt they would be on safer legal ground if they admitted it was a tax increase rather tan attempt to defend it based on the power to regulate interstate commerce.

Constitutionally speaking, this is a smart strategy. The Commerce Clause provides sweeping authority, allowing the government to regulate interstate commerce, a term of art that has come to mean it can regulate any economic activity. But this line of reasoning runs into problems because in the case of Obamacare there is no activity. It’s attempting to punish inactivity by punishing those who choose not to buy health care.

Democrats have sought to get around this problem by arguing that the collective decision not to purchase insurance has impacts that ripple into the economy. Numerous courts have pointed out that by this justification the government could regulate anything. “The government’s struggle to articulate cognizable, judicially administrable limiting principles only reiterates the conclusion we reach today: there are none,” the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its decision on the case

The potential for failure has led the Obama legal team to take the much safer approach – argue that Obamacare is a tax, which Congress can exercise to provide for the “general welfare” – even broader language than the Commerce Clause.

The Justice Department has latched on to this argument, pointing out to the court that the individual mandate penalty would raise substantial revenue ($4 billion). It is also collected under the Internal Revenue Code and must be reported on tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.” Therefore, despite the language of the bill calling it a “penalty” (a word chosen precisely because the Administration didn’t want it labeled a tax), if it walks like a tax and talks like a tax, it’s a tax.

(Of course, this too faces problems. As HotAir’s Allahpundit writes, “If Congress can use its taxing power to steer your money directly to private insurers, then in theory it could force you to fork your money over to any number of congressionally-favored private-sector businesses for not-so-public purposes.”)

But as the Obama Administration is keenly aware, enacting a new tax on the middle class in an election year is not sound political strategy, regardless of the legal merits. That’s why in public they continue to argue that Obamacare’s individual mandate should not be construed of as a tax.

The most recent example came in a hearing on Friday when Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients said Obamacare is not a task.

When asked by Rep. Scott Garrett whether or not the individual mandate penalty is a tax that undermines the Obama Administration’s claim that it is not raising taxes for any families under $250,000, Zients seems confused, before eventually saying that the penalty is not a tax.

Zients confusion is understandable. With the Obama Administration completing changing its argument depending on the day and who is listening, it’s tough to keep your story straight. Of course this rhetorical knot could all be saved if Obama would just start being honest with the American people.

Not really in the mood for gift giving huh? Yea, us neither. Any thoughts of a stimulus’ birthday party pretty much went right out the window when we saw the Congressional Budget Office’s latest unemployment report.

In a bit of deserved irony, the CBO issued a report highlighting America’s jobs problem on the anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as Obama’s stimulus bill. According to the report,

“The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression.”

But that figure doesn’t fully account for just how bad things are. The CBO found that if you count people who would like to work but have just given up the search and those who are stuck in a part time job then the unemployment rate is really 15 percent!

Unfortunately, the CBO isn’t exactly predicting things are going to get better anytime soon. Indeed, they project that official unemployment will remain above 8 percent until 2014, a full two years from now.

Which brings us back to the stimulus bill.

It was sold to the American people in the strongest terms. President Obama called it a “plan that will save or create up to 4 million jobs over the next two years.” Vice President Biden said that in “18 months” the stimulus would “create 3.5 million jobs . . . literally drop-kicks us out of this recession.” And a report by Christina Romer said that it would “more than meet the goal of creating or savings 3 million jobs by 2010,” and keep unemployment below 7 percent.

Not seven months later, Biden was back doing his best used-car salesman pitch. Despite the bill being an unabashed flop he still said, “In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well.”

Those must be some pretty bad dreams.

From the get-go it was pretty clear that our $787 billion wasn’t being spent very well. Dozens of reports came out highlighting some utterly ridiculous projects that were being funded with our tax dollars. Projects like a $2 million grant to fund a Nevada tourist railroad that dead-ends in Mound House, a town most famous for its legal brothels including the Kit Kat Guest Ranch and the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. And $489,000 to renovate a million dollar yacht own by the city of Los Angeles and used for “public relations tours of the harbor.”

This is our tax dollars at work, or as is more accurate, not at work.

The bill’s authors came to find out (thought it still will not admit it) that the stimulus rested on conflicting goals. They wanted it spent fast so they could reap the maximal political reward, but the best investments aren’t made quickly. They take time to find, research, and oversee, which is why the government is particularly bad at this sort of investment in the first place.

As Obama’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Public investment . . . must be based on due diligence. Not big money politics. Not stimulus timetables. Not sun-struck ideology. . . A nickel’s worth of common sense and a dime’s worth of caution might have saved Uncle Sam millions.”

Perhaps the most troubling thing is that President Obama’s top economic advisers were aware of these exact problems. “It is not possible to spend out much more than $225 billion in the next two years with high-priority investments and protections for the most vulnerable,” Obama’s team wrote. “There is tension between the need to spend the money quickly and the desire to spend money wisely.”

Despite these concerns they tried it anyway. And America is $787 billion poorer because of it.

So Happy Birthday stimulus. Forgive us for not buying you a present. Quite frankly, we can’t afford one anymore.

Sure, homeownership doesn’t exactly make sense for most college students. Better to find some roommates, dig up a cheap apartment, and hope you don’t do anything to lose the security deposit. But, for recent graduates and other young professionals renting is becoming the new norm.

The most recent census data reveals that the effects of the economic downturn are rippling through younger generations in a number of ways. We’re delaying life decisions like getting married and starting a family, but it’s also reducing homeownership rates as more young people decide to rent or move back in with mom and dad.

According to the census, homeownership has dropped most substantially among young people. Indeed, only 38 percent of those under-35 years old own a home. And even that number is skewed dramatically towards the upper end of the broad age group.

But just because we don’t own a home doesn’t mean that President Obama’s latest housing programs won’t impact us.

In case you missed it, Obama has spent the past few weeks attempting to sell a new plan to help get the housing market back on its feet. The plan calls for three parts. First, he proposes using the Federal Housing Administration, a government-run mortgage insurer, to refinance some underwater homeowners (those who owe more than their house is worth). Second, it calls for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to write down some mortgage principals, meaning that homeowners would suddenly owe much less on their homes. And third, the cost would be partially offset by a new tax on financial firms.

It makes for pretty clever politics. Housing is one of the key problem spots for some important swing states like Nevada and Florida, so appearing to have a plan can only help in those areas. Moreover, the bulk of the plan is being run through the FHA an easy way to keep Fannie and Freddie, which have been the subject of much ire, out of the news. And even if none of this goes into effect it allows the President to amplify two synergistic messaging themes he’s used to perfection in recent weeks: (1) Obama is doing everything he can, (2) but he’s trapped by a do-nothing Congress.

While it may be good politics there is no doubt it is bad policy, especially for young adults.

In essence, the plan is a massive wealth transfer from renters (many of whom are young adults or people who can’t afford homes) to homeowners. As Senator Bachus (R-AL) recently wrote in the USA Today, “[Obama] means well, but . . . it shifts the risk for borrowers who owe more than their home is worth from banks to taxpayers through Federal Housing Administration loans with a 100% government guarantee.”

Such a policy simply doesn’t make sense with so many young adults struggling relative to older age groups. A new Pew Research poll finds that far more older adults would rate their personal financial situation “excellent” or “good” compared to young adults – a gap that did not exist as recently as 2004.

Moreover, it is not as if the FHA is in great fiscal shape as it is. According to a recent report by the agency’s auditor there is nearly a 50 percent chance that the FHA will need a bailout within the next year, especially if the housing market deteriorates any further. As it stands the FHA only has $2.6 billion in reserves against a $1.1 trillion mortgage portfolio. That’s the equivalent of being levered 423 to 1 not long after banks failed left and right because they were overleveraged at 30 to 1.

So if the program works as planned taxpayers take on new debt, if something goes wrong at the FHA it could cost billions of dollars more.

Obama’s plan does include a small pay-for in the way of a new tax on financial firms, but this would only make the problem worse. The real problem that is holding back the housing market, and therefore the economy, is the lack of available credit. Having learned from the previous crisis and faced with much regulatory uncertainty, banks have enacted stringent requirements on just who they will lend to.

And yet, Obama’s plan would enact a new tax on these banks, likely causing lending standards to tighten even further as banks struggle to amass enough reserves. The result is a double whammy for young adults – not only are they forced to pick up the tab for some homeowners, but should they like to become a homeowner themselves they will struggle to find a loan.

If Obama’s housing plans succeed, college student’s and other young adult’s dreams of one day becoming homeowner may be pushed further into the future.

But if all of that wasn’t enough the President has the gall to tell us “this Budget will cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.”

What he neglects to mention is that 99.9 percent of that claimed deficit reduction consists of tax hikes, phony war savings, already enacted spending reductions, and net interest savings from those policies. That leaves a measly 0.1 percent left in actual new spending cuts.

Let’s take a closer look into those numbers.

On the revenue side, Obama’s budget contains $1.8 trillion in new taxes over the next decade. Among the most egregious are a tax hike on those who make more than $250,000, a tax that would hit a number of small businesses; it would slash a number of deductions and exemptions for things he doesn’t like (mainly those big bad oil companies) while granting new ones to things he does (anything related to green energy); it would raise the capital gains tax to 20 percent; and increase the death tax.

All told, under his budget federal revenues would be projected to reach 20.1 percent of GDP – about 2 percent higher than the post-World War II average. And despite all that new revenue his budget still doesn’t come close to balancing!

The war savings gimmick has been so thoroughly debunked that it’s amazing the President continues to use it. The gist of it is, that the CBO scoring rules assume the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to be funded at a certain level, even though we all know that they are being wound down and will cost much less. President Obama uses these “savings” to appear to reduce the deficit.

The problem is it’s totally phony. In a metaphor we can all understand, Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Budget,” likens it to a college student graduating with a whole bunch of debt who decides to go on a spending binge because they’re “saving” on college tuition. “When you finish college, you don’t suddenly have thousands of dollars a year to spend elsewhere – in fact, you have to find a way to pay back your loans,” writes MacGuineas.

The president’s budget also takes credit for the savings that resulted from the statutory caps and entitlement cuts that resulted from last summer’s debt limit debate. Apparently Obama has forgotten that Republicans spent months dragging Democrats kicking and screaming toward the idea of deficit reduction. In the end, Republicans were able to secure statutory caps that save $840 billion over ten years and set a trigger that would cut spending by $1.2 trillion over ten.
Not only does Obama’s budget happily take credit for the savings as a result of the cap, but he writes the other savings out of existence. That’s the equivalent of a $1.2 trillion spending increase – but of course Obama doesn’t score it that way. In fact, he ignores it completely, as if the bipartisan agreement never happened.

Finally, he adds up all of those “savings” and calculates that it will lead to lower interest payments over the next ten years…and then takes credit for that as well! That’s not true deficit reduction – it’s adding a gimmick on top of a gimmick!

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), a former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, has done the math behind these gimmicks and found something astounding. “That leaves very little, about $4 billion out of the $5.3 trillion that is really spending reductions,” Portman said today on the Senate floor. That means 99.9 percent of Obama’s claimed deficit reduction is nothing more than a farce.

This is not the kind of budget we need or can afford. America deserves real solutions, not tricks and gimmicks that seek to sweep Washington’s deficit woes under the rug. Sadly, it’s what we’ve come to expect from President Obama.

The president’s budget stands in stark contrast to the promises he made at the beginning of his term.

“We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end,” Obama said. “Contrary to the prevailing wisdom we can’t simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation. . .  That’s why today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.”

Given this is his last budget in his first term (and hopefully ever) we can conclusively chalk this up to another broken promise. In fact, not only did Obama not halve the deficit, he more than doubled it.

According to Obama’s budget, the deficit will be $1.3 trillion this year (the fourth straight year of trillion dollar plus deficits), $901 billion next year, and $704 billion as far out as 2022, the last year shown in the budget window. Over the next ten years the deficit will average close to $800 billion – meaning our national debt will grow from $15 trillion to more than $22 trillion.

A debt that large has significant consequences. Assuming bond markets even allow us to reach that level of indebtedness the annual interest payments on the debt are predicted to rise to nearly $1 trillion by 2022. By comparison that is double the amount of money we currently spend on all non-security discretionary programs. That includes education, investment, job programs, unemployment benefits, and hundreds of other programs that Democrats claim to want to protect.

And that’s a “best case” scenario. As a chart courtesy of the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy shows, President Obama’s past budgets have dramatically under-predicted future deficits:

If his budget is any guide, dramatically higher debt levels aren’t the only thing Obama has in store. To help “pay” for some of Obama’s new toys, his budget proposes $1.9 trillion in new taxes. Public debt, which crowds out private investment, coupled with higher taxes, that discincentivize productive labor, would be a double whammy for an economy we’ll need to fund Washington’s excess.

Moreover, whether he’s realized it or not, by assuming the expiration of the Bush-era tax rates on higher income earners Obama’s budget reveals the fallacy that soaking the rich is the path to balance. As Rep. Jim Jordan explains, “paying for all the spending President Obama wants would require a huge tax increase on middle class families.”

As it turns out, you just can’t have everything, especially if you do nothing on some of the largest drivers of the deficit.

In what is perhaps the biggest indication that this is nothing more than a political document aimed at wooing voters rather than displaying the leadership necessary to avert a fiscal crisis, Obama’s budget completely ignores Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These three programs, which together will make up the majority of the spending increases in the coming years, go relatively unmentioned in Obama’s budget. Granted, proposing reforms to popular programs is tough politics, but at this point Americans deserve honesty. And honestly, without significant reforms to America’s entitlement system then balanced budgets are essentially impossible.

At one time Obama realized the threat of ever-higher deficits and debt. He realizes that tough choices would have to be made if America wanted to be provide future generations with the same opportunities. Unfortunately, Obama has since given up on the hard choices. Instead, he’s taking the easy way out. And he doesn’t care what you think about it.

He called it a “generational assignment” or, if you’re into puns our “raison d’ebt.” It was an encouragement to not accept the government we had been given, complete with its unsustainable spending habits, but instead to create a lean and dynamic system capable of fostering a new, private sector-based prosperity.

“The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs,” Daniels said. “It has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.”

Optimism. It is one of the defining traits of our generation.

Throughout a recession that has seen young adults beaten and battered worse than any generation, we have managed to keep our chins up and our heads held high.

In fact, a new poll by the Pew Research Center finds that young adults have been hit hard by the recession. Currently, only 54 percent of 18-to-24 year olds are employed – the lowest percentage since the government began tracking the data. Even those who are lucky enough to have found work have experienced a 6 percent drop in earnings – larger than any other age group.

The sad state of youth unemployment is having a domino effect on numerous life decisions. Pew finds that 49 percent have taken a job just to pay the bills. 31 percent have postponed either getting married or having a baby, and 24 percent have moved back in with their parents to save money.

Nevertheless, young adults have remained steadfastly optimistic about their situation. According to Pew’s analysis:

“Among those ages 18 to 34, nearly nine-in-ten (88%) say they either have or earn enough money now or expect they will in the future. Only 9% say they don’t think they will ever have enough to live the life they want. . . While young people are less likely now than they were before the recession to say they currently have enough income, their level of optimism is undiminished from where it was in 2004.”

Now, some like Voltaire would merely say that such optimism “is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.” Or others like political scientist Raymond Aron would quip that “what passes for optimism is most often the effect of intellectual error.”

And all of that may be true. We may simply be covering our eyes and ears to the tough times around us. What’s more, we may be imagining a better future than really exists for us. Nevertheless, we must harness that optimism, that risk-taking spirit that succeeds with nothing but the brute force of our ambition, to ensure the America we inherit is the America we want.

That requires fulfilling our generational assignment. “They will attack our program as the way of despair,” Daniels concluded, “but we will say no, America’s way forward is brilliant with hope, as soon as we have dealt decisively with the manageable problems before us.”

Those problems include remaking a tattered safety net with rope that will not fray for future generations. It will require paring away government red tape that ties the hands of many entrepreneurs and small businesses. It demands that we squeeze every last drop of savings from our federal government so that we may divert a flow of dollars towards the pursuits that give us optimism about our future – education, infrastructure, and research. Finally, we must fashion a tax system that as former Treasury secretary William Simon says, “looks like someone designed it on purpose,” meaning fewer loopholes and lower rates.

Young adults have reason to be optimistic. But that optimism lies in the knowledge that our generation has what it takes to make things better, not in the current federal government that is doing everything it can to set obstacles in our path. We can succeed, but Obama has proved that we cannot count on Washington to do it for us.