Burdening The Children

by digby

As “Cat Food For Old Ladies Day” winds down, I think it’s only fair to let Dean Baker have the last word on one of the most egregious wingnut tropes around:

Suppose that the federal government decided to give every newborn baby $200,000. That might seem like an extremely generous gift. However, by the peculiar accounting of those who claim to be watchdogs for future generations, this policy would be bankrupting our kids. If that is hard to understand then you haven’t been reading The Washington Post or listening to the Blue Dog Democrats or following the work of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. This crew, along with the other deficit hawks inside the beltway, has decided that the way to measure intergenerational equity is to measure the size of the national debt, and this gift to newborns will undoubtedly increase the size of the debt. With a bit more than 400,000 kids born every year, this plan would add more than $1.6 trillion dollars to the national debt over the next two decades. No doubt the Peterson-Post crew would be decrying the unfairness of handing down this huge burden to our children. In their quest to cut Social Security and Medicare they have promoted a nonsense worldview in which the metric of how well we are treating our children is the size of the national debt. In the Peterson-Post world view, programs that spend money to better the plight of our children. For example, improving the education system or rebuilding the infrastructure or developing clean energy technology all make our children worse off, since their main measure of intergenerational equity is the size of the government debt.

I’ve always wondered why spending on education, health care and retirement was considered stealing from your children. After all, that spending is an investment in them in the first two instances. And in the last, it relieves them of the burden of having their parents move in with them in their old age.
Read the whole thing because it’s actually an important argument that needs to be made when the fiscal scolds start yammering on about bankrupting the babies.
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