Youths don't want our IOUs

IT'S GRADUATION time, a moment when we usually give young people our best advice.

Get involved. Stay engaged. Serve your fellow man.

Read more. Watch less.

Stop saying "like" so damn much.

Don't use your debit card if you're only buying a Coke.

That sort of thing.

Today, though, I have a different kind of counsel.

Do your best to hold us accountable.

That's what a half-dozen engaged, optimistic, just-graduated Phillips Andover seniors are trying to do. They call themselves the Concerned Youth of America -- and it's our profligacy they are concerned about.

We are piling debt on their shoulders as we pay for social spending and tax cuts and prescription drugs and other benefits by issuing IOUs they'll have to make good on.

"As it is right now, the government is spending at a rate that it can't sustain," says Yoni Gruskin, the group's executive director. "We believe our generation will be the ones who will pay the consequences of the misguided spending policy."

Last week was final exam week at Andover. Prom was pending, commencement coming.

Yet when I called, Gruskin and the others were meeting to discuss ways to highlight their issue.

So, I demanded of Yoni in mock serious tones, is he saying he's not content to spend his life working to pay for benefits for me?

He was the very picture -- well, sound -- of youthful diplomacy.

"We certainly believe that the baby boomers are entitled to proper retirement and medical benefits, but those need to be paid for," he said. "As the interest on the debt keeps mounting, it will really tie the hands of our generation to perform the basic needs of government."

Imagine those selfish kids, eyeing the impending avalanche of debt this country has run up in the last 6 1/2 years, and saying, hey, wait a minute, unless you do something, that's going to bury us.

Here they are, selfishly thinking about their future, which is decades off, when we're all busy focusing on what's really important: ourselves and our present.

I'm being facetious, of course. And yet, isn't it true that this nation is ignoring its intergenerational responsibilities?

There is little will to trim programs, but neither do we want to pay the taxes necessary to finance our current consumption or future promises.

We've got a Republican president who has presided over large budgetary increases, but who won't give an inch on the tax cuts that have eroded the revenue base. The chief executive always bears primary responsibility for fiscal discipline, particularly when he's had a Congress controlled by his own party for much of his time in office. So that's where the principal blame lies.

Still, with Democrats now leading Congress, they have to assume some responsibility as well. Meanwhile, we've got a crop of presidential candidates on both sides who are reluctant to confront hard fiscal realities.

Our national debt is about 37 percent of gross domestic product. Assume that we keep taxes about where they are and don't trim entitlements.

"In about 30 years, when these kids would be in their peak earning years, you will have a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 200 percent," says Bob Bixby, executive director of the deficit-battling Concord Coalition. "They would be looking at stupefying tax rates and a stagnant economy or slashed programs for everything they might want to spend their money on. It really is a generationally immoral fiscal policy."

To sound the alarm, members of Concerned Youth of America plan to start chapters of their group at their colleges next year.

"When people learn about it, they want to do something about it," says Sarah Guo, the group's communications director. "We have found that out from students at our own school."

And they believe they can persuade older generations that our current budgetary course is unfair.

"Parents are not going to support policies that harm their children," Gruskin says. "Right now they do because they don't know enough about our issues, but that's where we come in."

Further, they hope to put their concerns before the presidential candidates in New Hampshire.

"One of our goals is to have a campaign forum in New Hampshire in the fall, hopefully with UNH or Dartmouth," says Mike Tully, the director of development.

They have something to teach us. So go to it, graduates.

And best of luck.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.