Originally published in Indianapolis Star on 2/15/2012

America is flirting with a crisis of aspiration. Fewer people think pursuing the American Dream is worth it anymore. Worse, our political leaders seem out of touch with the problem.

The United States has long been a land of aspiration. With dreams and discipline, you can make it here. Our aspirational history stands atop three pillars: an entrepreneurial culture, personal independence and family stability.

Our capacity for creating new companies that add employees and grow at rapid rates has been the backbone of our entrepreneurial culture. Setting out on our own after high school or college, we have typically lived within our means and relied on others only when we have to. Two-parent families, even when imperfect, have traditionally provided the moral and financial resources for children to follow their dreams.

Before the recession, all three pillars were in disrepair. The recession only made the fissures deeper.

The entrepreneurship pillar. Research by the Kauffman Foundation shows that before the recession young businesses -- which account for most of our job growth -- were starting more slowly and creating fewer jobs. New firms are on track to create 1 million fewer jobs annually than the historical average. Our entrepreneurial dynamism has been on the wane as policymakers make entrepreneurship harder than it should be, and as we as a society raise fewer entrepreneurs than we used to.

The independence pillar. Debt makes independence tough. The average American household's debt stands at 154 percent of income, down 7.5 percent since the beginning of the recession but up precariously since 1990, according to an in-depth analysis by BlackRock Investment Institute. Student loan debt, at nearly $1 trillion, exceeds credit card debt for the first time. Worse yet, younger Americans are footing the Medicare and Social Security bills for a generation of elders who began retiring without first reforming the programs they had pushed into insolvency.

Meanwhile, welfare and entitlement spending were rising long before the recession. Today, one in five Americans is on some form of government assistance. Recipients are increasingly middle class, which means that dependence on public assistance is going mainstream, which in turn means reversing course will be challenging.

The family pillar. In Indiana, from 1900 through World War II, less than 2 percent of children were born to unmarried parents. By the 1960s, the figure had risen to 8 percent, and by 1980, it was 16 percent. Ten years ago, it topped 35 percent and today stands at 41 percent. Unmarried parents are typically in their 20s, not their teens. The research is brutally clear, if politically incorrect: If you choose to raise a child without being married, your child will probably do worse in school, be less productive, poorer, and likely to know state agencies all too well.

Our childbearing trends virtually guarantee that entrepreneurship and personal independence will continue to weaken as more of our children reach not for the horizon but for the fraying cords of the safety net.

We have always been an aspiration nation. We still can be. Political leaders should advocate for: more entrepreneurship education in schools; clear regulatory and tax reforms that benefit new, small enterprises; health care and entitlement reforms that scale back our growing welfare state, freeing up more dollars for productive activity; higher education reforms that emphasize quality and tie assistance to performance.

This is only the start. Proposals exist for allowing homeowners and banks to work together to unwind mortgage debt without bailing out either party. Ideas abound, such as tax reform proposals that strengthen married parenting.

Unfortunately, President Obama released a budget this week that largely ignores the foregoing issues while adding $10 trillion in new debt over the next decade to pay for spending he can't bring himself to control. The GOP candidates play with some good ideas in their tax and entitlement reform plans, but they have yet to show they understand our crisis of aspiration and what to do about it.

My hunch is that governors and individual members of Congress will be the best proponents of an "aspiration agenda" in coming years, and their collective efforts will ultimately push us to do the right thing. Here's to hoping (and aspiring).