Posted on 06/17/2012 2:00:25 PM PDT by The_Reader_David
Young people should welcome austerity measures because it means huge government debts are less likely to blight their futures, historian Niall Ferguson has said.
The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible....
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” ...
He adds: "If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party."
Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than "deeply misleading" figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities...
"The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron," he wrote.
"These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren,..." he said.
He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”
He suggests countries pass bills forcing their governments to balance the books and reign in "baby-boomers' profligacy", and says that voters are willing to "scapegoat" politicians and financiers but are unwilling to accept they borrowed too far.
If they fail, he warns, Western democaracies “are going to carry on in their current feckless fashion until, one after another, they follow Greece... into the fiscal death spiral..."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Good to read. Totally logical. However, I think so much of the younger generation have been so brainwashed by the social and fiscal liberalism of their teachers and entertainment by the time they realize the wrongheadedness of those ideas, it will be too late.
Indeed. If young people knew what was good for them, why... they wouldn’t be young people. “Too soon old and too late smart’’.
If the demographics of the vote in Wisconsin are any indication. There are a lot more young people learning about freedom than we suspected.
Few people will willing take less. Human nature
That's one of the nicest things about the British print media, none of the nonsense about being "unbiased" and "objective" then pretending one's own prejudices are objectivity. The odd result is that all the British papers, even the solidly left-wing Guardian, tend to do a better job of actual objective reporting than the American media. And, if you pick up a Tory paper, you can actually find conservative opinion in doses bigger than the column of a token house-conservative like George Will or Debra Saunders.
If you would like to hear what was actually said and done (and this year there is a Q&A session at the end), then you can download them from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/reith
Or at least I assume you can. The Beeb might have a block to non-UK based individuals. There are four in the series, being broadcast today and the next three Tuesdays.
Yes, that’s quite a problem.
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