Debt Can’t Burden Future Generations? : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education.

I’ve got a huge backlog of articles I’ve been saving to eventually discuss.  Here’s one by everyone’s favorite singing economist, Bob Murphy, in which he discusses the fallacy of “we owe it to ourselves.”  I don’t have much to add to his analysis, other than to maybe encourage everyone to take a step further back and think of the issue in more general terms.

Anyone who uses the language of we owing money to ourselves is clearly invoking a collectivist worldview.  This should immediately set off alarm bells in your head that such a person is up to no good and is probably misinformed to boot.  There is no collective entity that is merely moving money back and forth between accounts like an individual might between his checking and savings.  There are individual Americans who are being taxed so that the money can then be given to other individual Americans.  The national debt does not represent money that we owe to ourselves, it represents money that tax payers (current and future) owe to welfare recipients (past and present).