Is it really for the children?

It’s not uncommon to invoke “our children” when making a public policy argument, and in this respect, President Obama is like many other politicians. In his recent op-ed in the New York Times arguing for health-care reform, he stated:

This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life.

The better life our children will enjoy years from now will result from, he argues, better health care stemming from his reform. Whether health care will actually improve from federal intervention is the subject of much debate. There is another aspect, though, to the quality of life our children will enjoy years from now: the debt that they inherit from us.

“Our” children will be entering adulthood in ten years (2019), when his youngest daughter Natasha turns 18, and my youngest daughter (Sarah) turns 21. The economy will already be weaker in 2019 than it otherwise would have been as a result of the “stimulus” package. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) wrote on 2/4/09 that it “estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net.” This damage to our economic future is due to the additional debt from the stimulus.

On top of that, the federal budget proposals that followed make things worse. On page 11 of the CBO’s 3/20/09 analysis, it states “ The cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 under the President’s proposals would total $9.3 trillion, compared with a cumulative deficit of $4.4 trillion projected under the current-law assumptions embodied in CBO’s baseline.”

To put these numbers in context, when Natasha and Sarah are becoming adults, they will each owe an additional sixteen thousand dollars from Obama’s federal budget proposals, on top of the fourteen thousand dollars they would have owed anyway. It’s not just Sarah and Natasha, either. Every man, woman, and child will be on the hook for the national debt, and in an economy that is already weakened then by the hangover from the stimulus.

Against that backdrop, we are now going to have the federal government start spending on health care. The details are still being worked out, but the preliminary analysis of the Kennedy-Dodd bill was a price tag of over $1 trillion (or about three grand each for Sarah, Natasha, you, me, and every other American).

We all see the world through our own lens. From my point of view, however, spending money now and giving the bill to the next generation does not provide them with a better life.