Debt threatens future generations

To the editor:

For many years I taught college-level economics. This does not make me right, but it certainly is true that I have spent a great many years thinking about economic matters. I am expressing concern about the enormous size of our national debt and the fact that it continues to grow. Evidently the president and our other elected officials are not much concerned about this. Instead, they make matters worse by cutting the taxes of the rich and powerful whose political support they feel will keep them in office.

Our children and our children's children face problems far beyond those most of us faced in our lifetimes. We have burdened them with this enormous debt when they can least afford to pay it. Unless Social Security and Medicare are drastically cut, the burden on younger people who have not yet retired will be extremely heavy. In addition, our descendants will be living in a world rapidly exhausting the available supplies of petroleum and natural gas. In terms of the sacrifices we will have to make to obtain substitute sources of energy, it seems likely that they will be much more costly than fossil fuels.

Maybe our government's policy of increasing the federal debt year after year while cutting taxes formerly imposed on the rich is what elected officials want to call fiscal conservatism, but it surely is not what any normal person would call compassionate conservatism.

PHILLIPS H. BROWN, Cape Girardeau