“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

                                                                   -Preamble of the U.S. Constitution

 I had a discussion recently about the Obama stimulus bill that is currently awaiting approval in the U.S. Senate. While there is a lot of debate about whether this bill will truly stimulate the economy the way that it was originally intended to, I believe there is a more moral issue with the bill.  You can read in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution that our founding fathers were not establishing America solely for their own prosperity, but for their posterity, meaning their descendents. Much of their comfort was sacrificed in this process. It brought war onto American soil, took fathers and sons away from their families, many not to return, and essentially stopped trade into and out of the colonies, thus damaging their economy. But this was the price that Americans paid to ensure that the freedom that the founding fathers had dreamed of was able to be passed on to their children and grandchildren. In fact, it was so important to them that when the constitution was written, they included their descendants in the reason for its drafting.

Today, over two hundred years later, we have become the most prosperous country in the history of the world. We have the fastest growing economy, one of the strongest militaries, and the income level at our poverty line is in the top 15% of the world richest people¹ .  Now we are in the middle of what the media is calling an economic crisis and are considering passing a stimulus package that we believe will help pull us out. Without debating the effectiveness of the bill, we have to ask; is this what America has become about? This bill will allow the printing of hundreds of billions of dollars and put America into unimaginable debt. This debt will not be paid off in our lifetime but will pass on to our children and to their children.  Have we become so spoiled that we are willing to mortgage our children’s future because we can’t afford cable television or a new cell phone?  We have become so comfortable in our lifestyle that surviving on unemployment or having to drive an older paid-off car has become an economic crisis.

Our forefathers were willing to weather the storm and endure the hardships so that we might have a chance at the prosperity that we now have.  Is it really worth indebting our children so that our generation can remain as prosperous as we are? Or is it time to weather our own storm to ensure that our posterity is born with the same opportunities that we were given? 

¹Based on single person income of $10,400, according to www.GlobalRichList.com