Kumar and the Deficit
by digby
I guess there just isn’t enough hysteria about the deficit out there among the young, so the White House is trying to gin some up:
[T]he interests and concerns of the young don’t always dovetail easily with the realities of governance — as evidenced by Obama’s Facebook town hall this week. The earnest fun of social media comes to a screeching and deadly halt when the conversation turns to Medicare.
At the same time, the issues that younger voters are concerned about — jobs, student loans, gas prices, the environment — fall on the well-it’s-complicated side of the Obama achievement ledger. There’s not much good news there. So what to talk about with the kids?
“The White House continued its efforts to stimulate conversation among young Americans regarding President Barack Obama’s plan for deficit reduction in a conference call Thursday,” reports The Maneater, University of Missouri’s student newspaper.
Really? The White House — and this is not the campaign, note — is pitching deficit reduction to young voters. It works in part because of contemplated budget cuts for education and student financial aid.
“A lot of young Americans are concerned about their future,” Kalpen Modi, associate director of the White House office of public engagement, told students on the conference call. “They’re worried about the economy, particularly worried about increasing debt that their generation is going to have to shoulder.”
Modi, who returned to the White House last year after a brief hiatus to complete the third “Harold and Kumar” movie, also talked with students this week at Florida A&M University. It was one of 100 roundtables the White House is organizing with young voters.
Modi and Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of Obama’s council of economic advisers, told students on the conference call they want to bring the concerns of young voters to the president, so they can be included in the broader deficit reduction effort.
I hope they advised them to learn a whole lot about geriatrics and medicine because if they buy into this alleged necessity to cut “entitlements” they are going to be burdened with the personal care of whole lot of sick senior citizens. Let’s hope they all get very, very rich so they can afford to take care of all the generations of their families without much support.
I don’t know if it’s fair to characterize this the way that the article does — as a distraction from the real problems that these voters care about — but it’s hard not to wonder what the purpose of this is. There’s really no need to get young people all riled up about the deficit if they aren’t already. And it’s going to be hard to do it without creating some fairly unpleasant generational resentment. After all, the Republicans have a 30 year head start on the propaganda.
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