So much for looking out for future generations

To hear Republican leaders tell it, they are the nation’s true guardian of future generations — and this time, we’re not talking about abortion.

Just over the weekend, for example, Bush insisted that the nation has “an obligation and a duty to confront problems and not pass them on to future generations.” Similarly, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) argued that it is “morally wrong” for government leaders to put off problems for people in the future to deal with.

The context for their moral imperatives, of course, is a Social Security system that may face a problematic budget shortfall sometime over the next five decades. Meanwhile, though the president claims to have “an obligation and a duty” not to burden future generations, his actions prove otherwise.

Even if Bush succeeds in slashing the deficit in half in four years, as he has pledged, his major policy prescriptions would leave his successor with massive financial commitments that begin rising dramatically the year he relinquishes the White House, according to an analysis of new budget figures.

Bush’s extensive tax cuts, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit and, if it passes, his plan to redesign Social Security all balloon in cost several years from now. His plan to partially privatize Social Security, for instance, would cost a total of $79.5 billion in the last two budgets that Bush will propose as president and an additional $675 billion in the five years that follow. New Medicare figures likewise show the cost almost twice as high as originally estimated, largely because it mushrooms long after the Bush presidency.

[…]

By the time the next president comes along, some analysts said, not only will there be little if any flexibility for any new initiatives, but the entire four-year term could be spent figuring out how to accommodate the long-range cost of Bush’s policies.

“That president would have to face a very fundamental decision as to whether he would want to do what was right and be a one-term president or continue to play the same game and push it onto his successor,” said Leon E. Panetta, who served as budget director and later White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. “That’s really the choice that’s going to face the next president.”

“Morally wrong” indeed.

It’s one of the many things that makes the White House’s rhetoric so offensive. Bush’s gang, desperate to privatize Social Security, has settled on the “future generations” tack as a selling point, presumably because it polled well. They’re seemingly outraged at the very idea of making things harder on generations to come.

Simultaneously, the same gang is putting tax cuts for millionaires and two major wars on future generations’ credit cards, while crafting expensive new programs that we won’t pay for until Bush is gone.

It’s the height of irresponsibility and it gives new meaning to hypocrisy.