Generation Z will pay dearly for this American mistake regarding the enormous debt that baby boomers, Generation X and millennials are saddling them with, warns a former White House economist.

U.S. debt is at record levels and the Treasury Department missed an opportunity to help ease the burden on Generation Z, a former White House economist has warned.

This is because Generation Z already has enough worries and has become increasingly pessimistic. High borrowing costs have kept young adults out of the property market, while some scientists also point to the impact of social media on anxiety.

But Todd Buchholz, White House economic policy director under President George HW Bush, said that “Generation Zers also need to be concerned about the irresponsible debt burden that Baby Boomers and Gen and Y (millennials) impose on their narrow shoulders”. .”

It’s fair to say that America’s debt has been growing for decades. But in recent years, she has taken important steps forward. For example, gross federal debt as a percentage of U.S. GDP has exceeded levels reached immediately after World War II. Debt servicing costs are now expected to eclipse defense spending this year.

Figures like Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have recently sounded the alarm on the American debt. But Buchholz highlighted the consequences that Generation Z particularly faces.

“Half of young adults think they will never be able to afford a home, but they will still be asked to pay for their grandparents’ debauchery,” he wrote in an editorial for Project union Wednesday.

The United States had an opportunity to improve its debt outlook, but it didn’t seize it, Buchholz says. For years after the Great Financial Crisis, monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve kept Treasury yields at historically low levels, meaning that U.S. Treasury yields were historically cheap.

The Treasury Department, which sells U.S. Treasuries in global bond markets, could have kept these interest rates low by issuing bonds with maturities of 50 or 100 years, instead of bonds with generally limited maturities at 20 or 30 years old.

“But the Ministry of Finance has mainly made do with short-term loans, with the average duration of the bonds being only five years,” Buchholz said. “As a result, maturing debt is rolled over at a higher cost. »

In March 2021, with U.S. Treasury yields still at a low level of around 1.5%, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that there were “no current plans” to issue bonds. very long-term debt. That prompted hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller last year to call it “the biggest mistake in the history of the Treasury Department.” Today, interest rates are hovering around 4.5%, having peaked at 4.7% late last month.

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While the United States missed the opportunity to obtain cheap debt, at least fourteen countries, as well as dozens of companies and universities, issued very long-term bonds, Buchholz noted.

But he added that there could be other possibilities in the future and suggested that the Treasury Department should unleash a flood of very long-term bonds when inflation-adjusted rates fall below the historical average of approximately 1.55%.

Yet it won’t solve the massive federal deficits that are driving the U.S. debt.

“The fundamental budget problem, of course, is that there is too much spending,” Buchholz said. “President Ronald Reagan once joked that government is like a baby: on the one hand it has a big appetite and on the other it has no sense of responsibility. This joke is as true today as it was half a century ago.

This story was originally published on Fortune.com