Sorry, kid
What you have signed is a lot worse than it looks. An implicit social contract exists between generations, in which each generation pays its bills and tries to bequeath a higher income to its kids. In return, it can expect to be supported in its old age. Your great-grandparents' generation upheld that contract, in spite of the hardships of the Depression and the enormous costs for World War II. In those days honest Keynesianism ruled. In 1970, Ottawa had a debt of only $19.28 billion and a budget surplus. Since then, our generations have been breaking that contract during the best economic times in Canadian history and all the while with the knowledge that the demographics will shift to your disadvantage as of 2012.

The relatively fewer workers and taxpayers of your generation will have to service and pay our generations' unpaid bills, irresponsibly run up for our consumption. At the same time, they will be expected to support a bulging population of seniors with fully indexed pensions, free health care and subsidized prescription drugs. Today, 45% of the average provincial program budget goes to health care and drugs, of which 45% is spent on seniors. What will the figures be when the number of seniors doubles? Further, government debt is certain to explode due to entrenched deficits caused by major new and enhanced spending on programs, deep corporate tax cuts, the two-point cut to the GST, a serious and lingering global recession, exuberant stimulus spending, rising interest rates from all-time lows and costs for containing climate change. The result is more of your taxes will be diverted to servicing and paying our debt. With each budget deficit your future economic scenario grows bleaker and scarier.

Sorry, kid
Political parties look down on voters as if they are stupid and shallow. They are afraid of losing votes if they tell it like it is and ask voters to sacrifice for you and your future. They feel voters cannot be informed and motivated. So their policies exclude spending cuts and higher taxes. While dodging any question about you and your future, politicians of the various parties and interest groups with their causes skillfully manipulate public opinion to their advantage. Your only hope is to convince political parties they are dead wrong. Voters are not stupid and shallow. Public opinion can be swayed in your direction. The most votes can be found in protecting you and your future. Political power can best be retained or gained with policies that make protecting you and your future priority number one.

Sorry, kid
Politicians and interest groups use rhetoric to work public opinion. But nobody is challenging them by matching their rhetoric on your behalf. From where you sit, you are the exploited victim of our bloated overspending and short-sighted under-taxation. What we are doing to you and your future is unqualified fiscal child abuse and is not fair, just or moral. We are taking advantage of your helplessness and betraying your innocent trust. We have bought into the lies of politicians and interest groups. They keep telling us that a society can finance tax cuts and the elimination of poverty by ever-increasing public debt. The truth is our accumulating public debt and its mounting annual interest payments invest in taxes, poverty, unsatisfied needs and a lower standard of living for your future society, whose public finances will already be under stress from its shifting demographics. Our massive public debt represents your taxation without representation, an intergenerational tax grab, the total of us not paying our way and the real fiscal imbalance. You were born into a greedy, apathetic and negligent society.

We dare not make a people issue out of fiscal responsibility. This would be to admit that our intense care and compassion for others exclude our kids and grandkids, the future workers and taxpayers of Canada. It would also mean confronting the hypocrisy of being proud of our universal social programs and smug about our prosperity while financing them partly by stolen money. We dare not tarnish our glorified self-delusion that keeps on whispering we are absolutely terrific generations of parents and grandparents.

When you grow up
Will you ever forgive or forever hate us for saddling you with massive public debt and its impoverishing annual interest payments? Will you cut the pensions, free health care and subsidized prescription drugs of seniors to pay down your inherited debt? Will you, for the love of your kids, break the cycle of fiscal child abuse, started by the seniors in the 1970's and foolishly accepted and gleefully joined in by the Boomers and then by the Gen Xers?