Today I was thinking about the Democrat narratives, the ones trotted out by Bernie and most of the radical left in the Democrat party, that government needs to provide more, to spend more on social issues like glasses and hearing aids for the elderly and just about everything you can think if that is packed in Biden’s Build Back Broke package.
Then you wonder if we need to spend all this money now, why wasn’t it necessary back in the 50’s and early 60’s.
Then it dawned on me that this is truly a generational issue, it is a Wimpy issue (those of us of a certain age will remember this Popeye character). This is one of those they “will gladly pay us on Tuesday for a hamburger today” situations
During the Obama years, there was a lot of chatter about “intergenerational theft” in the past several years since we entered the period known as the Age of Obama. Brought about by massive spending, borrowing and budget deficits to support the overweening entitlement state, this is a term that was tied directly to and brought to prominence and common usage by the Tea Party protests. While this connotation is correct in this context, there is a broader context that we haven’t discussed.
Conservatives and classical liberals are opponents of big government and use many effective arguments to support their position – lower taxes spur growth, government needs to get out of areas that it was never intended to be in, big government is unresponsive government, etc. but there is another argument to be made about how intergenerational theft isn’t a recent bug in the operating system of government, it is a feature of it – intergenerational theft is the very mechanism by which government perpetuates itself and grows.
Back in the Obama years, there was a term that gained credence in the lexicon of the institutional Left. Joining “social justice”, “economic equality” and the “1%” was “intergenerational fairness”.
How totally unsurprising that the efforts of the left generated intergenerational unfairness.
Back in 2011, Dennis Sewell, writing in the UK Spectator stated:
“‘Intergenerational fairness’ is a seductive piece of branding. Who would declare themselves against fairness? In theory, it should have a particular appeal for conservatives. The idea that each generation is both beneficiary and trustee, with a moral obligation to the future, is as old as the conservative disposition. Edmund Burke pictured society as ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Successive generations of Conservative politicians have taken up this theme, culminating in David Willetts’s 2010 book The Pinch, a provocative and engaging account of how the selfish and irresponsible baby-boomers ate all the pies.”
Rick Perry, back when he was a Republican candidate for president, was pilloried for using the term “Ponzi scheme” in reference to Social Security – he was right but didn’t go far enough.
The entire “progressive” ethos of government is based on being a Ponzi scheme. Think about it – how do “progressive” programs work? Every single one of them starts life, as Social Security did, as the solution to a problem, most even reasonable – but eventually the costs of the programs grow faster and the liabilities greater until the original scheme of funding is ludicrously short, thereby spending faster than the intake can keep up with them. Then the borrowing starts. This means that the recipients of the promised returns (benefits) get those returns directly from other investors (taxpayers) and not from the fruits of their investments (taxes).
Ergo, a program that Charles Ponzi would be quite proud of.
Why is it that way?
It is this way because the “progressives” in both parties (yes, there are “progressive” Republicans) have continued to make promises to the current generations to maintain power. This isn’t just welfare and 99 weeks of unemployment; it is a market basket of treats that are offered today on the government MasterCard with no payments due until next year – except each successive generation for the past 70 years has been told the same thing. The sad truth, one that is completely ignored by the left, is that sooner or later the bill comes due.
One might think this intergenerational theft started under FDR, and for practical purposes, it did – but the global destruction of WWII and America’s primary role in rebuilding the world saved the Greatest Generation from having that debt fall on their shoulders. What we are dealing with today is the legacy of government social spending that began with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs back in the 60’s.
The money spent by the government back in the late 60’s has never been repaid; the debt has just been rolled into a new note that was increased with added deficit spending by each successive president. Since 2012, taxes (federal, state, and local) have made up more cost to actual taxpayers than food, clothing and shelter combined.
If Bernie and the Democrats are looking to blame someone for granny not being able to pay for her hearing aids or a single mother with three kids needing welfare to get by, they need to start looking at the social programs of Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama – and yes, even Bush.
So, maybe they should buy a mirror.
And now the Biden administration wants to put the unborn in shackles made of debt.
Understanding that government hunger for taxes is perpetual, our founders, Thomas Jefferson primary among them, were very concerned about the ability of the current generation to bind future generations through laws, debt and taxation. The idea of a non-coercive social contract also argues that we have no right to bind future generations to conditions they had no say in creating. This is the reason that Thomas Jefferson argued that no constitution should be valid for more than 19 years – he believed that life – and governance of it – belonged to the living.
The Founders thought it unconscionable that a child could be born burdened with crushing public debt as children are today –a child born today is immediately responsible for $87,000 in debt and $479,000 in unfunded liabilities placed on them by preceding generations.
But here we are and nobody in government seems to understand how we got here.
Let me simplify it for them - they bought a lot of hamburgers with our futures and Tuesday is almost here.
Great analogies-It blows my mind that the government keeps on spending and printing more money-I guess looking back at history does not matter to them!