… is from page xxvii of Michael Boskin’s Foreword to the 1986 volume, edited by Dwight Lee, Taxation and the Deficit Economy:
The short-run horizon of our political process is particularly pernicious in dealing with policies that transfer resources across lifetimes and between generations. Our most important policies in this regard are our public debt, Social Security, and capital income taxation. The lack of a vote by unborn generations aggravates the political and ethical dimensions of these policies immensely.
DBx: Yes. Although written 40 years ago, Boskin’s words are today as true and relevant as they were when the ink used to print them was still wet.
Even if – contrary to fact – accumulated government debt poses no fiscal problem for the government, such debt represents today’s citizens-taxpayers living at the expense of tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers. The ability to live at the expense of other people who do not consent to be hosts to parasites is not only a recipe for economic waste (if not necessarily to fiscal crises), it is also unethical. Financing government spending with borrowed funds is no less wasteful and no less unethical than would be financing, say, your household’s spending with funds that you drain, without permission, from your neighbors’ bank accounts.
