Entitled Americans

             “Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boom 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.”

This is so true.  Of course, the authors go on to say that the reason this happened was because we, as a nation, were running up a big deficit and playing fast and loose with financing.  When I bought my first house in 1974 or 75, I needed to put 20% down, and the interest rate was 9%. People who bought houses had to prove that they were solvent.  A few years ago, before everything blew up in the mortgage world, I saw more than one episode of House Hunters where the buyer put nothing down and either rolled the settlement costs into the mortgage or had the seller pay them.  And they were so proud to be homeowners!  They didn’t really own even a piece of anything.  I’m betting that all of that blew up on them.

But, why wouldn’t someone do that if they could.  It’s the American dream to own a home.  Why wouldn’t we use energy if the price were being kept low, etc.  People believed they had a divine right to it because it was there for them to take.  It suited business and government to allow us to behave as though we were entitled.  I’m guessing that it was a slippery slope, and most citizens didn’t—don’t-- realize that there would be long-term consequences to these policies. So, now it appears that we have a nation of people (voters) who have been spoiled, and nobody who wants to be elected or re-elected can tell them that the party is over.