The Education Advocates' Battle Cry: "Let's Push the Kids Off the Fiscal Cliff!"
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 10, 2012 at 6:22 am
Look, let's keep this simple. As a nation, we're spending vast sums we don't have. In every year of President Obama's first term, we borrowed more than a $1 trillion. Today, the federal debt stands at $16.4 trillion (we spend $220 billion a year just paying interest on the debt.) If we extend the Bush tax cuts, once again prolong unfunded "patches" to avoid pain associated with the alternative minimum tax and Medicare physician payments, and fail to make the cuts dictated by sequestration, the debt is expected to rise to more than $22 trillion by 2020. (I'm okay with going over the dreaded "fiscal cliff," even though the tax increases and spending cuts are expected to trim next year's GDP growth by a half-point, largely because doing so would cut that projected debt down to only $14 trillion in 2020.) Who's to blame? All of us. We're enjoying services that we don't want to pay for--which means we borrow the money, then leave the bill for our kids (that's right, to the same children we claim to love so much). Our profligacy is not just an economic concern; it's a vast,
