I read with interest (better to say "dismay") today's Breakpoint article by Charles Colson on the growth of our national debt. He wrote: [my bolding]
As of last December, it was approximately $10.7 trillion, a
23-fold increase. And the per capita national debt had risen to nearly
$35,000. This year’s budget deficit will raise the debt to
approximately $12 trillion.
What’s even more troubling are so-called “unfunded liabilities.” These are the promises that the country has made to future retirees, like Social Security and Medicare. These total an estimated $52 trillion and the bill will begin to come due in 2011, when the first of the “Baby Boomers” reaches 65.
Sixty-four trillion—about $200,000 per man, woman, and child—and still climbing. Who is going to pay for this? Certainly not those of us over the age of 50. No, it will be our children, grandchildren and probably our great-grandchildren.
Me: How many people understand this? If they did, I am sure yesterday's successful Tea Parties would have been still more humongous. But Colson brings out a hidden theological twist that needs noting:
While governments can and arguably should run deficits during times of emergency, the 23-fold increase in the national debt wasn’t the product of emergencies—it was more the result of what passes for religion in American life.
In this false “religion,” called “moral therapeutic deism,” the “central goal of life,” as sociologist Christian Smith writes, “is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
A belief system that exalts “being happy” and “feeling good about oneself” doesn’t lend itself to sacrifice and postponement of gratification. On the contrary, it leads to the kind of excess, binges, both in the home and in public life, that got us into the present mess—a mess our descendants will be cleaning up for a long time. Imagine what our children’s memories of us will be. I shudder to think.