
"My hope is that your generation will help restore virtue in our country. All our problems arise from the undermining of core principles from our founding."
- U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., an early supporter of the Millennial Debt Foundation, in a note to MDF founder Weston Wamp.
We launched the Millennial Debt Foundation in late 2019 to bring a generational voice to the conversation about the fiscal future of America at a time when both parties in Washington have chosen political expediency over sustainable policy.
The national debt represents more than a mathematical problem for our country, it's ultimately a generational challenge. Never before in human history has one generation saddled another with debt at the scale that is happening today in America. Our ongoing experiment in fiscal and monetary policy, made worse by a pandemic, begs important questions about the long-term consequences.
Washington has no plan to avoid the national debt ballooning more than $100 trillion over the next thirty years, dramatically impairing the government's effectiveness as interest payments alone are projected to exceed the size of Social Security as millennials prepare to retire. Simply put, the full faith and credit of the United States is being placed on the theory that our government can sustainably provide one dollar's worth of services while paying only 75 cents.
Fiscal matters used to be the niche domain of deficit hawks and economists, but we believe that nearly every issue in American politics, from China to climate change to the economy, is now a fiscal matter. Fundamentally we have to decide if we are willing to risk everything on the theory that debt doesn't matter OR recommit to the virtue of stewardship and commit to reforms that will strengthen America for decades to come.
We're leading this conversation across the country through both our regional Stewardship Series events and the Millennial Debt Commission, which is made up of a diverse group of millennial business leaders working alongside economist and members of Congress on a framework to stabilize the national debt.
Weston Wamp
Founder, Millennial Debt Foundation
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