'We're Burdening the Children' Is An Abjectly Keynesian Fatuity

“We’re burdening the children” and “we’re burdening the grandchildren” have been used repeatedly by so-called “deficit hawks” for decades. Les Rubin is the latest - but surely not the last - deficit hawk to use children as props. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In February of 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.5%. Two months later, and ten million lost jobs later after the U.S. political class chose to fight a virus with economic contraction, the rate of joblessness was 14.7%.

The major change in the employment rate was an effect of a political class using its taxing and borrowing power to subsidize economy-crushing lockdowns. As for what happened to U.S. businesses, American children, and the world more broadly thanks to lockdowns paid for by wildly productive and excessively taxed Americans, the story is sick-inducing.

Furthermore, it’s an answer to Rubin, along with Rose Bowl-sized crowds of deficit hawks who’ve long said the same as he does about government borrowing being left at the doorstep of the "children" and "grandchildren." Some who agree with Rubin even employ the line from legendary public choice theorist and Novel Prize winner James Buchanan (1919-2013) about how “The primary real burden of a public debt is shifted to future generations.” No, that’s wrong. Gravely wrong.

The horrors of government spending are felt most cruelly by those who live under it, and it’s not even close. Which is, or should be, a statement of the obvious. See the lockdowns that could never have happened stateside absent consumption of trillions in wealth by the political class. The cruelty of government spending is a now thing, always.

Consider the various wars in just the 21 st century alone that a U.S. political class with way too much money at its disposal has entered the U.S. into. Would or could Rubin et al seriously believe the grandchildren will largely bear the burden of the federal government's towering ineptitude overseas? Has Rubin seen the price of diesel, or food, or a regular tank of gasoline as politicians with taxable access to trillions of wealth spend blithely on threats real, and imagined?

Traveling back in time to the 1960s, would readers prefer to have fought in or endured the Vietnam War, or be asked to pay off the debt ($111 billion) run up during the war? Conservatives are known to say that the War on Poverty from the same decade generated more poverty than it erased (assuming any at all), at which point we might ask who was harmed most: those who suffered the foolishness of government or those paying for it now?

The simple truth is that government spending is the central planning of resources. Translated, it’s incredibly damaging right now.

Yet to read Buchanan, or those who stood and stand on his shoulders, we’re having a party that future generations will pay for. What a wrongheaded, and yes, Keynesian view. That’s because Keynes’s disciples believe government spending powers growth. Quite the opposite.

When governments consume wealth, there’s logically less investment, fewer businesses, and fewer productivity gains that we suffer through reduced opportunity at lower wages. Again, the horrors of government spending are ours, not the burden of future generations who merely have low interest debt to pay on a bad day, and on a good day, inherit a government at least somewhat constrained by past waste.

So, which do you take? The never shocking stupidity of government wealth consumption, or debt? Hopefully the question answers itself.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.