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Squandering our children's future

Massive debt burden threatens to impoverish generations to come

By Ruth Mantell, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- My five-month-old daughter is going to have some serious financial troubles when she grows up, mainly because I'm already borrowing money from her.

Many parents like to at least try to transfer some of their own wealth to their kids. But not me, and not the millions of other moms and dads across the country. Unless we do something about our government's massive annual deficits and debt our kids could be paying dearly tomorrow for our spending today.

As debts rise so will interest payments, "and every generation of Americans is going to face a larger burden," said Edmund Mantell, my child's grandfather and a professor of economics and finance at Pace University's Lubin School of Business in New York. "We are borrowing from future generations. Instead of transferring our wealth to them, we are transferring their wealth to us."

The deficit has funded expensive wars and efforts to rescue the economy. As a parent, I'm worried that our spending has been poorly executed, and that incompetency and partisanship in Washington will hurt families stuck in a crippled economy.

Debt can be dangerous, as any credit-card holder whose future has been threatened by growing bills knows. We hope that future generations will be wealthier than us, but we may be standing in the way of economic growth. FULL STORY