Life was a constant struggle to put food on the table and to pay the rent.

That,the Greatest Generation, learned to be frugal, work hard and obey the law so that we had the opportunity to go to college and potentially be successful. If we stepped out of line my father had a belt he was not shy about using. (He would get arrested for that today). My mother made us eat every last morsel because there were those starving kids in Europe right after the war. We were taught that it takes hard work, sacrifice and integrity to get ahead. As a Jewish kid I was also taught that there were quotas of Jewish admissions for Ivy League schools, there were places I was not allowed to live and companies who would not hire me. All of these lessons of life combined to make me more determined to succeed and beat the things trying to hold me back. I was typical of most in my generation. There were no government programs. No hand outs. No lawyers suing those schools or companies. Nobody but my family and mainly just me to figure out how to get an education, food to eat, and a job and a place to sleep. We were on our own to take responsibility for ourselves and make it or not.

As prosperity increased many people in the seventies and eighties did not want their kids to have to go through what we did, and the process began to make life easier and better for kids. The follow on generation, today's parents, took that and made it so now kids don't even have to work to eat as I did. They don't sleep on a friends couch to avoid sleeping in the street as I did. Now at a young age they get a credit card, cell phone, and a vision of themselves that they are entitled to these things because their parents, their several tutors, coaches, shrinks, and teachers tell them they are smart and wonderful so of course they should have everything for no effort. I have an acquaintance whose 28 year old, well educated boy is told to follow his dream while he lives at home with an endless credit card, five star hotels wherever he goes, seeking to be a film director without staring out as a gofer. Just directly to director because he is so smart and it is his dream.

We are now moving to the final stage of the downturn of America. Obama says he intends to transform America and he is doing it. We are moving to follow Europe where the government supplants the family and any sense of responsibility, and tells the populace that now the government will pay for your food with stamps, your rent will be subsidized, if you are irresponsible and stupid and lie on your app to get a mortgage you could never afford, the government will force the bank to pay you thousands of dollars for not dotting every I when foreclosing after you lived essentially rent free by not paying your mortgage for two to three years. They will pay you unemployment for two years to sit home and not work so you can become unskilled and unemployable. If you are one of the lucky six million you even get a free cell phone. And if your boss says you are lazy and doing a lousy job and fires you, and if you are not a white male, the government will make sure you are paid big bucks for enduring such an insult. You want to go to college but don't have grades-no problem. We will give you free remedial courses and then you will get accepted before that white male because you are disadvantaged and a person of color. You of course had nothing to do with your failure to succeed, it is all the fault of the big bad banks and millionaires.

And who pays for all this. The white guys who studied hard, worked hard, took nothing, sacrificed, risked, and made a lot of money. The government tells you it is not fair that they made all that money and it is only fair that their wealth be redistributed to make all these government programs work. We have to make taxes fair and have the top 1% cover the 47% who pay nothing. That is fair, isn't it.

That is how America has progressed in my lifetime. Look around at history.

It is how other great nation states became small and poor after rising to supremacy. Greece, Italy (Rome), Spain, Great Britain, Japan. All once world Dominating.

America is not on the precipice of a fiscal cliff. It is on the cliff of its destiny, and I fear we are about to be lead over that cliff. I take great pride in all my friends who sacrificed, did it on their own, and never felt entitled to anything. We took responsibility for our own lives and we earned what we have. That creates more pride than anything. It was what made America the land of opportunity.