When in the course of national affairs, it becomes necessary for one generation to dissolve the political and financial bondage which have connected it with others, and to assume among the powers of our republic, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles it. A decent respect to the opinions of society requires that it should declare the causes which impels it to generational divorce.
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that the rights of people all generations are equal, that we, as young people, are entitled to inherit the same free and opportunity-filled country that the generation currently in power inherited.
We, as a generation nearing voting age, or having recently become of voting age have not given, nor have we even had the chance to give, our consent to having our rights and opportunities taken away. The rights and economic opportunities that we hereby demand have been the birthright of every American since this nation’s founding, and we will not be the generation from which these rights were stolen.
The generation currently in power has sold our future labors for their own comfort and political gain by amassing a crushing level of national debt that will be our responsibility to pay off. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power has stolen and spent the Social Security money that current and near future retirees have entrusted them with. Now our generation is being told to pay the retirement benefits which should have come from the savings that were squandered. Even the most wildly optimistic projections on the future of Social Security predict that we, when we grow old, will get back a small fraction of the wealth that we will have contributed. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power has tricked many of us into indentured servitude by enticing us into taking out massive loans to pay for educations that previous generations could afford to obtain without going into debt. Colleges can only charge the highly-inflated tuitions that we must pay today because of all the government loans and grants that bid up the price. Previous generations were charged market prices for education, so tuitions were affordable. The grants and the loans make the colleges rich, while we must bear the excruciating cost in the end. Since college loans, which now can only be obtained from the government, can not be adjudicated in bankruptcy, we, as a generation, are at great risk of being coerced into some form of national service at some point in our lives. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power is about to force us to buy health insurance, which we don’t necessarily need and we don’t necessarily want. Money that we should be saving to take advantage of future opportunities will instead be taken from us and used to subsidize a generation that does not wish to pay the cost of it’s health care itself. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power has, through unprecedented levels of taxation, regulation and debt, destroyed the economy which we are now joining. Free market capitalism, which produced historic levels of wealth for all Americans, has been replaced with a system of near-fascist cronyism. The economic opportunities that greeted all previous generations do not exist for us. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power is, by means of reckless levels of monetary inflation, destroying the purchasing power of the currency that it forces us to use. The basic needs of our lives, such as food and energy, are becoming unaffordable for those of us just starting out on our own. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power has made cars and car insurance unaffordable because of a stifling level of regulation and a legal and tort system they’ve allowed to run amok. This, along with the high cost of gasoline has deprived young people the cherished freedom of inexpensive travel that previous generations enjoyed. We did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power is rapidly destroying our civil liberties and our privacy rights before we have even had the opportunity to enjoy them. We, as a generation must now look forward to a government with unlimited police powers, a government that will insert itself deeply into our affairs for our entire lives. No previous generation has had to suffer this and we did not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power is stripping away our rights to a passport. It wants to prevent us from emigrating sometime in the future to escape the financial prison being built for us. First, those who owe child support were denied the right to a passport. Now there is a law pending to deny a passport to those whom the government claims are delinquent in their taxes. Sometime in the near future the government will demand that those wishing to emigrate first pay off their share of an unpayable national debt. The right to emigrate is one of the most basic of human freedoms and we are soon to be denied it. We do not assent to this.
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The generation currently in power has sent hundreds of thousands of our young people into the crucible of endless and unwinnable wars. These wars are destroying our bodies, destroying our souls, and causing thousands of our generation to suffer unimaginable pain and death. We did not assent to this.
Never in our great history has the younger generation been forced to pay for the excesses of the older. To the contrary, the American tradition is to help the younger generation get started in life. The generation currently in power has had a lifetime to accumulate assets and wealth and must not make itself a burden to it’s children. Therefore we, as a generation, demand that we be permitted to live our lives for ourselves and our own children and our children’s children. You do not own us and we were not placed on this earth to serve your interests.