Is “passing the buck” immoral?
National debt and generational justice
I hate to be the one to continue with the Sarah Palin theme, but alas. A comment the former Alaskan governor and vice presidential candidate made in an interview published today by TIME Magazine raises an interesting question about the morality of national debt. In the interview, Palin claims that President Obama’s stimulus policies, “incurring the debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we’re passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn’t even make economic sense.” She makes two separate claims here: 1) Obama’s policies won’t work (don’t “make economic sense”); and 2) that, regardless of their empirical effectiveness, they are “immoral.”
This second claim, on the morality of leaving debt to our children, falls within a growing literature on generational justice. Morally, what do we owe to the next generation? What economic resources must we leave them? What kind of planet (environment and natural resources)? Questions of distributive justice are (relatively) easy when we consider one generation of people, but get significantly more complex when we have to think about saving resources for an unknown number of humans to be born in the future. Given that politicians are elected only by currently living adults, questions of generational justice are often left by the wayside. But they constitute an important part of political morality.
-Marc
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- What morality “means”
- Cash for Morality
- What if equality and growth were compatible?
- Robert McNamara: Part-time political philosopher
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10 Responses to “Is “passing the buck” immoral?”
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Thomas Jefferson: “…the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
If you believe Jefferson, then Congress is immoral due to the debt they have passed on to future generations. Each party has its own pet projects (military vs. social spending), but the end result is the same: enslavement to debt.
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