Since We Care So Much About Our Children, How About If We Don’t Bankrupt Them?

We definitely don’t want our children to be murdered in school shootings, as the post-Newtown furor has demonstrated. That is a sentiment with which I heartily concur. I also don’t want my children to be struck by lightning, which is considerably more likely than being shot in school, or to be killed in a bicycle accident, which is around ten times as likely as being murdered in school. But while we are expressing concern for such remote contingencies, how about if we deal with an absolute certainty–that every American child is being saddled with a crushing burden of debt?

Currently there are around 74 million children under the age of 18 in the U.S. If you divide our $16.4 trillion debt by 74 million, you get $222,000 apiece. If you assume that two of those kids get married, they owe $444,000 together. And if you assume that your kid is going to be one of the 50% who pay any discernible amount of income taxes, the tab comes to close to $1 million. That is truly a crushing burden, and it isn’t a one in million risk, it is a certainty. Michael Ramirez makes the point:

Barry, of course, doesn’t have to worry. His daughters attend Sidwell Friends, which bristles with armed guards, above and beyond the girls’ Secret Service detail. Nor do his children have to fret about their share of the national debt. Like Bill Clinton, Obama will retire a very, very rich man. So it isn’t Barry’s children we are talking about, it is only yours. And who cares about them? Not Barack Obama and the Democrats, obviously.

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