Voices PAGE C1 GUEST OPINION ANDY CALDWELL: Why life and property are compromised / C2

As tensions about raising the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling build, the headline that should be flashing in front of every American is that our country is not working.

Nothing is going to get fixed — really fixed — until we come clean about this basic, sad and distressing fact.

How can it be that we have national debt equal to the size of our entire $32 trillion economy?

And where were we all when this happened? As recently as 2008, the debt was 39.2%, rather than 100%, of our GDP.

One of the outcries that fueled the American revolution was taxation without representation. But this is exactly what is going on today.

Who is on the line for this $32 trillion debt? You and me.

There are two ways that federal spending can be financed. Taxes or debt. Politicians don’t like taxation

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that members of the current generation of twentysomethings (let’s call them “Gen Z” although more appropriately “Gen Zinn”) do not think highly of the United States, to the point where many, if not most, say they “are not proud” to live in America or to be American.

Here’s why they feel that way.

Howard Zinn, the man who wrote the history book that an entire generation grew up reading and believing, was a left-wing activist. (Dr. Zinn, a history professor, died in 2010 at the age of 87.) For the past 40 years, schoolteachers have been using his “A People’s History of the United States” as reading material in the classroom.

You should know that Dr. Zinn participated in a political rally in Times Square with a group of communist acquaintances