An Economy Problem

There's a guy running for office up here whose campaign reminded me of something I've been thinking about.

Over the past couple presidential elections a whole bunch of people have been talking about the US debt and deficit spending, often mentioning saddling the grandkids with repaying all the money we've borrowed to pay for things they don't think we should be spending money on. Their very simple fix, of course, is to stop spending money on things they think is wasteful (which is damn near everything).

That sounds pretty good on the surface, and I'm sure there's lots of money that can be saved, but it got me to thinking.

This candidate guy boasts that he was mayor of some town and managed to balance its budget and maybe even saved some money. Considering how easily statistics, especially economic ones, can be manipulated, I'm sure there's some way he can be telling the truth about that. I've also noticed, now that he's no longer mayor, that his town is doing a lot of road repair, putting in traffic islands, generally fixing things up.

Which leads me to my problem.

It looks to me as if instead of saddling future generations with debt, we can stop spending money and saddle them, instead, with future spending. It's sort of like putting off borrowing money to get your car fixed or a water heater replaced and, instead, letting your kids inherit something that needs repairs in order to work.

To put it simply, the money's got to be spent either now or later. Not spending the money now doesn't seem to me to be saving your kids anything at all and pretty much just puts them in the position of borrowing the money.

I'm not sure there's a great deal of real difference between inheriting debt and inheriting expenses.

Not spending the money now doesn't mean that it will never have to be spent is my point. Worse, any good feeling we might get from not giving our kids a bill might be short lived if they look at what we give them as being a piece of junk that will cost them a fortune to keep running.

I'm no economist and never even studied economics, but I hear that interest rates for borrowing are very low right now. As someone who inherited a distressed property (and admittedly let it get worse), I'm fairly confident in saying there's no easy way out of the situation.

Also, I'm not gonna vote for the guy.