Freedom and opportunity are the salient reasons America is a success in the world. That heritage is the birthright of American citizens. But the horizon of freedom and opportunity is receding for the current generation of the young. Unfortunately, most of them don't even know it.

The headlines are full of fake priorities. Instead of reports about the real economy--how people assess the chances for getting ahead in this recession and after it--you have stories from Washington excoriating private sector executives who make what someone considers too much salary. Even if that were a problem, what business is it of the government's? And if it somehow is a legitimate government concern (for example, because the government is busy nationalizing various previously private corporations), why is it more deemed more important than the opposite issue--the disincentives for people of skill and talent to save and invest? Why is there so little focus on what it takes to get people who still have money to create wealth, add jobs and provide a way to pay off the mountain range of debt President Obama has raised up?

The younger generation is being asked to endorse new government programs--including the take over of health care by stealth--and are not being told that they will have to pay for it. They will pay either through higher payroll and income taxes or through the hidden tax of inflation. The only other option is to grow the economy fast enough to provide new sources of government revenue, but that option is being closed by the Obama Administration's high-tax, high regulation policies and its unremitting demonizing of business people.

Mark Steyn asked a week or two ago (in National Review) how the generation now being born can handle all the new debt being piled up when the next generation, in plain fact, isn't big enough--the age cohort is too small--to do the job.

Ask yourself: how many children have you had? (Remember, the replacement rate is technically, 2.1 children per woman.) How many of those--and those of your friends--are getting married and having children themselves? Of those, how many are applying themselves to the study and hard work that will provide a living as high or higher than that which you have achieved?

Do the math. It doesn't pencil out when you are looking at the country as a whole. Even immigration doesn't solve the problem, since most immigrants are not educated for the jobs of the future.

So, you have a population too small to carry the burden being placed on them and unequipped to shoulder it anyhow. Then you adopt tax and regulatory policies that discourage rather than encourage enterprise and economic growth. And guess what? You get a rather more bleak future than people have faced in a very long time.

We can get over this, but it won't be easy or painless and it won't happen with the present media slant that misinforms the people about what is really going on. The beginning of constructive change is honesty about our problems.

Sadly, the generation whose hopes are being blighted is the generation that has been most successfully bamboozled about the present reality.