I don't like thinking about the future these days. It used to be the future was all about service robots and day trips to the moon and skyscrapers 2,000 feet tall. But the old modernist optimism that once informed Star Trek and The Jetsons has been eclipsed by an uglier vision of tomorrow. It's a tomorrow laden with melting ice caps and babbling fundamentalists and economic stagnation.

It's the last part that's been bothering me today. Putting aside for now that the leading indicators are up and that major financials are posting impressive profits, this country is facing a fiscal crisis the likes of which the world has never really seen. 

A big part of this fiscal problem has to do with health care, and it's good to see the Obama Administraion trying to do something about it, although I'm hardly sold yet as to whether or not the President's plan will actually be deficit-neutral or whether it will actually help control the rising costs that are quite literally projected to bankrupt the country soon.

What's worse is that the Administration is having a hard time controlling the conversation about this capital Very capital Important issue; last week the media's attention was conventiently drawn away by a trivial, let me say that again, this time underlined and in bold trivial affair involving a clear misunderstanding between a Cambridge police officer and a professor at Harvard. Because the American public has the attention span of six-year olds and because the major news services in this country now act like toy companies (did I mention Walter Cronkite died? Walter Crokite is dead), nobody is very interested in hearing about reforming gaping holes in the federal balance sheet. Without public interest in this issue, the political will to resolve them once and for all will remain anemic at best.

Not to mention that spending political capital on the issue of health care reform itself prevents the Administration from tackling Social Security in the near term, another economic cyanide pill that seems to be politically capital Impossible to deal with. With those ever-so-thrifty Baby Boomers getting old we are soon going to have to pay more than ever to support a generation of retirees that is bigger than ever and who will live longer than ever. Theorists and consultants and think tanks can mull over how to fix the pension problem all they like, but the reality is that it stems from a few capital Very capital Big decisions that our parents' generation made a long time ago and we are in deep enough that these will be hard to deal with in any palatable way. 

One of these is a simple hand-in-the-cookie-jar problem: starting in the eighties our ever-so-smart leaders decided to raid the trust fund to finance its glorious new system of permanent deficit spending. 'Kay, that's budgetary. Leave it to the accountants, right?

But there's another problem, a bigger problem, one that spans across both oceans to our parents' counterparts in the rest of the developed world: they started having fewer kids. That's right, the "Me" Generation didn't want snot-nosed brats like us cramping their style--god forbid they share their SUV's or their 7000 square foot homes with enough future taxpayers to finance their retirement! The decline in fertility across the rich world is taking the shape of a leveling in some places and an implosion elsewhere; universally it means that the Boomers will continue to suck us dry through much of this century. 

Between Social Security and Medicare, we are in quite a bind. At current rates of taxation, Congress could eliminate every other federal program and still come up short. Rosy, no? So we know that taxes will invariably have to be raised. What's more is there will be fewer people actually payingtaxes--that's you and me--per beneficiary.

In short, we're headed for a hard landing. We've been headed there for a long time but we have procrastinated such that our political process seems incapable to do enough and fast enough to stop it. Whether we want to deal with taxation and stagnation like the Europeans and Japanese deal with is no longer up to us--especially not the generation that will have to live through it. It will be a necessity. Thank your parents. 

When I think about the future now, I have a harder and harder time imagining the same kind of utopian scenarios our grandparents cooked up in the 50's and 60's. I'll probably never get to fly to the Moon (laugh all you want, the child in me is bawling) because in all likelihood things like NASA will be sliced and diced to prop up an teetering welfare state. I'll probably never own a robot butler; in the future such things will only be affordable in the Gulf States. When I think about the future these days, I think of one thing and one thing only: income taxes. I can't wait.