Idiot voters

The New York Times had a story that said that if you are a young voter, you would have to be an idiot to vote for the Democrats.

OK, well, it didn’t exactly say that.

What it did say is that the United States Treasury is having some difficulty making its debt payments. The bills are coming due, and the payments on the debt are our largest expenditure in the budget.

Edmund Andrews of the Times put it this way: “Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed. Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.”

If you are a young voter, that should make you mad. If you then realize that Senate Democrats over the weekend passed a healthcare bill that will put more than $2 trillion more on the tab, you should get a whole lot madder. And when you realize that the Democrats help pay for this healthcare bill by specifically raising taxes on young, healthy adults who may not want to pay for healthcare insurance, that ought to make you even more furious.

Mitch McConnell once said that the Democrats' fiscal irresponsibility is like if a college student stole his or her parents' credit card and charged up to the maximum, leaving the parents paying the bill. Actually, it is worse than that. It is more like the parents stealing their kids' credit cards and charging up the maximum, thinking they will be long dead before anybody has to pay it off.

Young voters voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. They voted for him because he was new, because he was hip, because he was cool, because he was post-racial, because he was hopeful, because he pro-gay. Well, he may have been all of those things. But his administration is also fiscally irresponsible and is sticking young people with the long-term bill.

Obama has done nothing on the rising costs of college education. He has done nothing to create jobs. He has done nothing to reform entitlement programs. He has done nothing to put Social Security on a more sustainable path.

What he has done is charge the max on the kids’ credit card. That bill will come due long after Obama is gone. This is not the change any of us can believe in.

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