Youth is wasted on the young

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin beat me to an article that's been forming in my head for a while: why do younger voters cling to Obama when he's saddling the next generation with incalculable debt and future obligations? Readers of this blog will recognize these concerns in "The War on the Young":

To begin with, the debt we are amassing will have to be shouldered by the young throughout their working lives. President Obama has added nearly $3 trillion to that debt in his first two years in office (after his predecessor had added more than $4 trillion in his eight years). And Obama’s budget would add a total of more than $11 trillion over just the next decade. By the time today’s young workers are at the peak of their working lives, America’s national debt will equal more than 200 percent of our GDP (up from roughly 60 percent today), according to the Congressional Budget Office. Today’s young voters will be left with the bill, but without many of the benefits of that spending.

That is because our entitlement system, which transfers immense amounts of money from the young to the old, cannot be sustained. Welfare states are always built on the backs of the young, and some degree of age-based wealth transfer is reasonable, as able-bodied workers help older people who can no longer work. But to sustain themselves, and to avoid suffocating the larger society, such entitlement programs must take care to allow young workers to build wealth, and to start families of their own.

This is a theme that Mark Steyn explored in "America Alone." The birthrates in Europe and Japan continue to decline at the very pivot point in history when governments are more dependent on young workers to pay for an aging society. This goes back to a very simple premise: when you make things too expensive (raising a family) people will stop doing it.