Honored graduates, congratulations on earning your degree. Your hard work and the support or your family are estimable things, genuine achievements in an age of false value.
I would also like to take this moment to apologize. I am truly sorry for what I and my colleagues have done. I wish I could say that we didn’t know what we were doing when we did it, but I can’t.
Perhaps some of us chose not to know by declining to read the bills we voted on, but that doesn’t really excuse us does it? If you flunked a test because you didn’t open a book all semester, I doubt very much if your professor would excuse you from the consequences of your sloth, so I am not going to excuse my own laziness.
Instead, I am going to get out before you kick me out. You may have seen that my colleague, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the very influential chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, announced he was retiring? He said he was “bone tired.”
What he truly is, however, is scared, and not just of the shellacking he was going to get in November. He’s scared, as I am, of what we have done. So we and many others are getting out now. Honestly, we have locked-in six-figure lifetime annual pensions and health benefits, and the prospect of a cushy and lucrative lobbying deal. The country is on the edge of a fiscal and national security cliff, but individually, we have done very well indeed. This isn’t fair, but I am trying to level with you here.
The reason I want to apologize is that there aren’t any jobs, unless you’d like to hold a clipboard for the census for a few months, and most of those jobs were given out already and are obscuring the real unemployment rate.
Not only aren’t there any jobs, there is a staggering national debt that has to be paid. By you. Tens of millions of us are owed Social Security and Medicare, and we voted that you would pay us.
Not only aren’t there any jobs, there is a staggering national debt that has to be paid. By you. Tens of millions of us are owed Social Security and Medicare, and we voted that you would pay us.
On top of that we have a nice mandate waiting that obliges you to buy health insurance and we’d like those student loans we took over paid ASAP. Your parents can put you on their policies — as if that isn’t going to cost them in the next round of premium hikes.
That’s my legacy really, to have spent all the money and forced America back into multigenerational housing regardless of its wishes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and my colleagues have pretty much turned the country upside-down and shaken every dime from every pocket, spent them all and handed out IOUs at 10 times the rate of even three years ago.
We gave all that money to our pals, to our friends in the United Auto Workers and the various public employee unions. The kicker is — and it is one heck of a hangover — there aren’t any new UAW jobs or teaching or other government jobs for you.
I confess I don’t really know where all the money went, but are you surprised? I have colleagues who think Guam will tip over if too many people stand on it. Congress isn’t exactly full of the people who won the spelling bee.
So the money is all gone. So are the jobs. Your taxes are high and getting higher, and our military is being hollowed out. I’ve got mine though, and you have a degree. And a lot of debt. Debt you cannot even begin to imagine. I am sorry. Enjoy your day.
