[Previous entry: "Runes in the Ruins of the Angry Norse Dittoheads"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Paper Training"]

01/12/2005: "An Immortal Country Inhabited by Immoral Mortal Citizens"

First, repeat the title ten times fast. Thus mentally limbered up, consider that the Bush Administration has been approaching the question of long-range budget forecasting for Social Security as if the country is a kind of immortal person. For example, you see words like “we” and “our” in connection to paying and owing money far into the future, a time when most of the people using the word will be dead. For example, Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols recently said “America's taxpayers deserve, and our future economic prosperity demands, a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.” For extra credit, listen up to Administration mouthpieces for your own examples – it won’t take long. Talking about the future in terms of “we” and “our” is fine, as far as it goes. One thing “we” don’t want to forget, however, is that thinking of the country as an immortal entity that can make long-term plans is at best an imperfect abstraction. A better representation of reality is that the country is a collection of living but mortal citizens split across all age groups. It is important to note this distinction because planning decisions that seem perfectly reasonable for individual persons have moral implications when applied across multiple generations. For example, a person can make the decision to defer gratification in the hope of a better situation later. As an academy graduate, I certainly understand the concept of deferred gratification! Conversely, a person can make the decision to “make hay while the sun shines,” by spending now to enjoy life better now. Vacation is a good example. You could defer vacation trips to save for retirement, and certainly want to save some money for retirement, but would likely be less able to enjoy it then. In both cases the specter of mortality looms. You don’t want to defer gratification too long because the clock is ticking. The clock doesn’t tick for countries and other immortal legal entities. If a country decides to make hay while the sun shines, it is future generations that pay the price, not the citizens having the fun. This of course is exactly what’s happening in Bushonomics. Financial proposals are being couched with phrases like “dealing with problems now rather than in the future” with solutions that shift the burden from now into the future. For example, the Bush team has been floating the idea of big-time borrowing to fund the transition to Social Security accounts. Who will be making big-time payments to pay back this big-time borrowing? The same citizens socked with redeeming the so-called Social Security Trust Fund to pay for boomer retirement, who also happen to be the same citizens paying interest and principal on the mega-debt inherited from the boomers, and who also happen to be fewer in number than the boomers they’re supporting in retirement. They’ll also live in a world from which the boomers have subtracted a certain percentage of Earth’s finite, irreplaceable resources. It reminds me of those split personality stories, where the responsible personality wakes up to find that his playboy alter ego has been up all night drinking, running up the credit card, and getting into fights. The responsible personality then has to go to work nodding off, hung over, and black and blue. Come to think of it, this is the perfect analogy for what’s in line for our children and grandchildren!