Few Americans of the Greatest Generation (those born from 1901-27 and earlier) are alive today. Few remain of the Silent Generation (those born from 1928 until the large post-war Baby Boom generation began in 1945). These are the older generations who demonstrate frugality by such quirky habits as actually saving string and turning out lights when leaving the room, reflexive actions that amuse younger generations who have known only plentiful material amenities and have become the ultimate consumers that economic growth today depends on for roughly 70 percent of US gross domestic product.
Austerity is not a natural way of life for today’s postwar younger generations of Americans such as Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Generation Alpha. These generations harbor expectations of large screen televisions in every room of the house, separate bedrooms for every child in a family, a car for every adult and typically also for every child of driving age, and cell phones for every member of the family instead of one landline telephone serving the communication needs of an entire household.
These Americans exhibit high time preference, enjoying consumption today at the expense of tomorrow’s youth, who will inevitably receive the burden of today’s accumulating IOUs. This may be an underlying explanation of today’s Millennial and Gen Z fertility rates as low as 1.66 births per woman—well below the replacement rate of 2.1—threatening the survival of intergenerational benefit programs such as Social Security.
It looks like this is a time-preference problem in individual Murkans. The last few cohorts have gotten themselves or been trained to have very high time preferences, in other words, they want it and they want it now! This is causing problems with credit because if you want it now and have not the money to pay for it, then you have to put it on credit, one way or another. Therefore, you can see the credit crunch that is happening now with the state and individuals, their debts are sky high and are going to lead to repudiations. Ouch!! They will hurt. Unfortunately, the banksters have made it illegal to repudiate school debts, which are some of the highest of the debts.