You’re wrong about the assumption that “previous generations… tried to get everybody out of poverty”. You’re also very wrong in assuming that previous generations paid high taxes. The modern two-earner family has been made necessary by… higher taxes of all kinds. That’s a relatively modern invention. Ditto the hidden tax of inflation, which is, with FICA, the most regressive (and deliberate, and well-hidden) tax of all.
I’m not here to defend “my generation”; I’m here to tell you that it is the higher spending (especially without higher productivity to back it up) that is bankrupting the nation.
That’s pretty much a function of government. They pander by buying votes from voters whom they also “educate” just enough to move the levers of the machines that keep the money flowing and ironically, “move the levers” in the old-fashioned voting booths, too.
Heinlein was exactly right when he described the mechanism by which democracies will destroy themselves…
“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”