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Debt Denial: Stealing from Our Kids

Our handling of the national debt is like a grand, inter-generational Ponzi scheme that’s destined to drown our children and grandchildren in red ink. Our leaders like to call their strategy borrowing, but it is really tantamount to stealing — from our children, worse yet. Why? Because we have no plans to pay the debt. None. We continue to borrow just to make interest payments that are estimated to be $5 trillion over the next decade while doing nothing to pay down a staggering debt of $17 trillion.

Equally alarming, perhaps even surreal, is that party leaders who can hardly agree on the color of the White House can be found nodding their approval at the fiscal fiction “that deficits don’t matter,” as then-Vice President Dick Cheney told a disbelieving Paul O’Neill, the treasury secretary at the time.

Fast forward a decade to President Obama, the anti-Cheney, who was telling George Stephanopoulos on ABC that “we don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next 10 years, it’s gonna be in a sustainable place.” House Speaker John Boehner, considering the President’s comments in a separate ABC interview, concurred that the crisis is not immediate. This pervasive Washington attitude is reflected in Office of Management and Budget’s 2014 projections that show the national debt haplessly climbing skyward through 2020 with no sign of coming down.
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