There’s an important article on the ABC news about the response to intergenerational imbalance as a result of millennials and gen Zers progressively replacing boomers in government.

One of the issues raised here is our stupendous national debt, which will need to be paid back out of future national earnings.  This is an issue all over the world.  The article says:

“What about national debt?  This needs to be paid back by tomorrow's taxpayers.  Sure, analysts don't believe it's an unmanageable level...”

The usual reason that analysts that “don't believe it's an unmanageable level” is that they expect to rely on the increasing size of the economy (economic growth) to relatively reduce the size of national debt.  Usually the global economy doubles in size every 20-25 years, making the debt relatively half the size it was.

However, as the global economy grows so does our greenhouse gas creation, resource use, waste production, general pollution, land use, and many other factors.  We are already at or over the limit for most of the issues; to halve the relative size of global debt we will have to double all of these factors.

The dilemma, then, for those future leaders is: do we default on the debt that is owed to already-rich people (mostly boomers), or do we destroy Earth to pay them back?  How hard a question is that?

You can read the ABC news article here.

You can find related posts here:

economic growth, government debt, society

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