Real Clear Politics: 'Change' For Our Children by Robert Samuelson
WASHINGTON — The big lie of campaign 2008 — so far — is that the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, will take care of our children. Listening to these politicians, you might think they will. Doing well by children has now passed Motherhood and Apple Pie as an idol that all candidates must worship.
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Our children face a future of rising taxes, squeezed — and perhaps falling — public services, and aging — perhaps deteriorating — public infrastructure (roads, sewers, transit systems). Today's young workers and children are about to be engulfed by a massive income transfer from young to old that will perversely make it harder for them to afford their own children.
No major candidate of either party proposes to do much about this, even though the facts are well-known.
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But facing these facts would expose candidates to three daunting problems.
First: Lightening the burden on the young requires cutting retirement benefits for the old — raising eligibility ages, being less generous to richer retirees and making beneficiaries pay more for Medicare. Simply increasing taxes or cutting other programs won't work. The problem is not just closing the budget deficit.
Second: We can't wait. Ideally, prospective retirees would have received several decades' warning; but we've delayed too long. We need to cut benefits for baby boomers and even some existing retirees. They are the source of mounting costs.
Third: Even if retirement benefits were cut, pressures for higher taxes and lower public services would not disappear. Social Security and Medicare are part of the nation's social fabric. Although individuals' benefits can be responsibly trimmed, the growth in the elderly population (a doubling by 2030) and rapidly rising health costs would still expand total spending. The increases would simply be smaller.
A moral cloud hangs over our candidates. Just how much today's federal policies, favoring the old over the young and the past over the future, should be altered ought to be a central issue of the campaign. But knowing the unpopular political implications, our candidates have lapsed into calculated quiet.
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