Consistency Check…

I was reading this article about how Greenspan, in the last year of his tenure, appears to be off his game. What caught my eye though wasn’t that there is a “debt maelstrom”, after all we all have heard about he high trade deficit, budget deficit and the potential problems they pose. No, what caught my eye was the following,

A continuing reliance on deficit spending is precarious for the economy and patently unfair to the future generations who will be stuck with this rising mound of debt.

Now my guess is that the editorial board at the SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronical) are liberal. From this it is probably fair to surmise that the person(s) responsible for that editorial feel that abortion should be legal. Yet it seems strange to invoke fairness to future generations when looking at tax/budget policies. I mean in one case, the argument is that the fetus is not a person and hence has no rights. People three or four generations from now also do not exist, and thus also have no rights. The idea that something is “unfair” to them is just patently ridiculous…using the above reasoning. Seems like a pretty substantial consistency problem, but maybe I’m wrong.

FILED UNDER: Economics and Business, ,
Steve Verdon
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.

Comments

  1. Paul says:

    ROFLMAO That was funny… And the truth behind it is, of course, what made it so funny.

  2. ken says:

    Steve, you are an idiot.

    We are not talking about some abstract future generation here, we are talking about my child, my nieces, my nephews.

    You’d have to have real family values to understand my anger at you for borrowing money to fund your own tax cuts and then leaving it to my family to pay it back. They are the ‘future generations who will be stuck with this rising mound of debt’.

    You make me sick.

  3. Steve says:

    Thanks Ken.

    I suppose you ardently oppose Social Security and Medicare as well considering they do the same thing and are even worse in that the generation that faces the tax actually exists.

  4. ken says:

    Steve, What are you, some kind of rush limbaugh fan proudly ignorant of reality?

    Social Security is 100% funded through 2042. We did this with savings through higher payroll taxes. So my generation of baby boomers is pretty much taken care of. After we die off our children and grandchildren will not have as many retirees to take care of. A modest increase in wages subject to the payroll tax will make the system solvent through 2075.

    Medicare is different. But why would anyone, including my children, be opposed to providing health care? No one, execpt for the Bill Gates types can afford to purchase medical care directly, any more than we can afford to purchase our own justice. Can you just imagine if Lacy Pettersons family had to pay the millions of dollars it took to prosecute her murderer themselves? There would be no justice in America. I can’t imagine why you and people like you want no health care in America. You would suffer along with everyone else.

  5. Steve says:

    Ken I never listen to Limbaugh.

    As for Social Security it is funded through 2042 because of current taxes. Same thing for Medicare.

    So my generation of baby boomers is pretty much taken care of. After we die off our children and grandchildren will not have as many retirees to take care of.

    I love it. You got yours so screw the rest of us…including your own children. And you call me a heartless bastard.

    Also, you are quite wrong. The Baby Boomers are not a bulge that will eventually go away. The demographics predict that the number of retirees will rise and stay at the high level. The reasons for this are that there has been medical advancements so people will not only live longer, but also more and more people will make it to retirement.

    I suggest that before you run around calling others idiots you do a modicum of basic research. At the very least you wont appear so ignorant.

    A modest increase in wages subject to the payroll tax will make the system solvent through 2075.

    Sure if you consider a 12% increase in the tax rate “modest”. And what happens in another 20 to 25 years when the program is insolvent again?

    Medicare is different.

    Medicare is basically the same as Social Security in that it is a transfer program. The difference is that Medicare applies to a specific good whereas SS is a direct cash transfer.

    But why would anyone, including my children, be opposed to providing health care?

    Strawman, argument to pity, and a red herring all in one sentence. I’m impressed at the amount of fallacious logic you could cram into just one sentence. Where did I ever say anything about supplying health care? Oh, nowhere.

    My point was that the program taxes one generation to pay another. Something you seem to find abhorrent, but now you are defending it.

    No one, execpt for the Bill Gates types can afford to purchase medical care directly, any more than we can afford to purchase our own justice. Can you just imagine if Lacy Pettersons family had to pay the millions of dollars it took to prosecute her murderer themselves? There would be no justice in America. I can’t imagine why you and people like you want no health care in America. You would suffer along with everyone else.

    Bravo Ken on being such a logically challenged stooge.

  6. Norma says:

    This is an interesting exchange with good information, although neither of you will ever budge. I’ll link to it as soon as I can get blogger.com to stop sending me error messages.