Will our children have it better than us?

Parents no longer think that their children will have it better than they did, wrote Peggy Noonan for the Wall Street Journal on Friday. In her article “America is at risk of boiling over,” she noted the growing pessimism among American citizens amid economic and social turmoil and how it’s reshaping Americans’ view of the future. She wrote,

Our problems as a nation have been growing on us for a long time. Their future growth, and the implications of that growth, could be predicted. But there is one thing that is both new since 1994 and huge. It took hold and settled in after the crash of 2008, but its causes were not limited to the crash.The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.… Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn’t do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won’t be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.

The Pew Research Center also released a study on July 23 about how the latest recession has affected the attitudes of Americans regarding the future. It noted:

During the past decade, Americans have grown increasingly skeptical about the standard of living of future generations—and this skepticism has deepened during this recession. Today fewer than half (45 percent) of adults believe that when their children become the age they are now, their children will enjoy a better standard of living than they have now. Even more striking, 26 percent now say their children’s standard of living will be lower. This is a “positive/negative” gap of just 19 percentage points on a question that tests the public’s faith in a core tenet of the American dream—the idea that children grow up to live better than their parents.

Although there is bad news immediately ahead for Americans and their children, in the longer term, there is good news coming, as the Trumpet has often written, after man finally realizes he cannot govern himself. To learn more about this future, request a free copy of Herbert W. Armstrong’s booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.