Fairness Among Generations At Core of Need for Fiscal Sanity

Nov 7, 2010 Posted by Solomon Kleinsmith

The Concord Center’s Fiscal Solutions Tour has been bumping around the country for the last month and a half or so, bringing common sense ideas on how we can save ourselves from financial ruin over the next generation or so. At the Tour’s most recent stop, in Philadelphia, the crux of the issue was focused on.

Every dollar we borrow might as well be two dollars (more likely even more than that, if the problem persists and compound interest is able to go to work on even bigger mountains of debt) out of the pockets of your kids, and their children. The image of stealing candy from a baby, or perhaps taking money out of a child’s piggy bank, is the most appropriate I can think of.
They cannot defend themselves, and unless we do, they will come into the workforce with taxes far higher than anything this country has ever seen, a severely cut military, a much weaker social safety net and little to no flexibility in looking for ways to adapt to the complications that the future will assuredly bring.
We needed to start working on this twenty years ago… but the best time to start is now since that didn’t happen. Its not like we haven’t known this was coming. When the President’s bipartisan commission on fiscal responsibility and reform comes out with their report, we need to form the core of the groundswell that forces our politicians to heed those recommendations like they did the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. We need to start heeding the wise words of President Kennedy, caring more about what we can do for the country, rather than selfishly asking the federal government to do more for us than we are willing to pay for.
We need to unite around our greater angels, instead of the increasingly short sighted partisans that have controlled DC for the last generation.