Next easy part (apologies, my brain likes it when I focus on one specific thing at a time), I was assuming that passing debt on to the next generation was selfish. I am very biased that way. But if there is some reasonable argument for why doing so is not just taking from them to spend for us, I'd listen.
On one hand, it
can be selfish -- if you are borrowing for superfluous or unjustifiable reasons.
For example, Bush 43 started two very expensive wars
and cut taxes
and added the Medicare Drug Benefit during his term, and borrowed to pay for it all, because he knew the political penalty would be very high. I find it hard to justify that choice.
In contrast, the federal government very quickly created multiple stimulus packages during both Trump's and Biden's terms to deal with the economic fallout of COVID. I'd view that as justifiable, as much of that money actually flowed back to the federal government as tax revenues, and also by getting people back to work faster increases future tax revenues.
That aside, suggesting that federal debt is a massive burden which cripples the young simply doesn't make sense, for a few reasons.
One is that federal debt is not like a car loan, which must be paid off by a certain date or someone will repo Mount Rushmore. It just gets rolled over.
Another is inflation. Even with 2% inflation, the value of $1 is cut in half in just 20 years. Meaning the burden of today's borrowing actually fades over time.
A third is that it's not like someone is going to walk up to your kids in 2040 and say "your share of the federal debt is $100,000 and you have to pay it
right now." If anything, I'd say the biggest burden facing most young people today is
student loan debt. They are saddled with quite a bit of that debt because, unlike many other industrialized nations, the government doesn't subsidize post-secondary education (college, university, job training etc).
Along those lines, pretty much everyone today has paid taxes that went to paying off previous debts. Meaning you aren't saddling your kids with a different burden than you're facing right now. The interest payments are less than 10% of my tax bill. I don't feel absolutely crushed by federal debt. Do you?
On a side note: Social Security is explicitly set up so that the current workers pay for the current beneficiaries. It's not a gigantic 401(k), it's a pay-as-you-go system. When you pay your payroll taxes, it doesn't go into a special account with your name on it -- it pays the people who collect SS right now. If you feel bad about an older generation taking from a younger generation, does that mean you want to eliminate Social Security? Or switch it to an Australian-style system?
There is also a purely practical issue, which is that
cutting the debt just won't happen, no matter how much anyone screams about it. The only way to deal with this is to increase taxes and cut spending, and no politician wants to do that, and few who want to do it can get away with it.
To wit: Clinton actually managed to produce a surplus, mostly by presiding over a good economy and the Dot Com bubble, along with slightly bumping up taxes. When Bush 43 came into office, with plenty of vocal deficit hawks in Congress, what happened? He didn't even consider retiring some of the debt. He sent checks to Americans; started two wars; cut taxes; added a Medicare benefit; and at the end of his term, a massive recession caused revenues to drop and spending to increase.
If a bunch of elected deficit hawks can't actually use a surplus to pay down the debt, then how is it going to happen?
