The Big Picture...

A Moral Issue

The debt issue is a serious financial problem in this country. However, it is also, in many ways, a moral issue because we are passing this debt on to future generations of Canadians without their consent. In personal terms, this is much like passing on your huge credit card debt to your children to pay.

This moral dimension to the debt crisis is addressed in The underground royal commission Report.

Charles Adams, tax historian, as quoted in the Days of Reckoning book and video:

Government can spend money it doesn’t have because it can push the debt off on our great-grandchildren and they can pick up the tab. All we have to do is pay the interest. We’ve discovered a clever way of borrowing money that we don’t have to repay. We can just roll it over, and when we die our kids can pick up the tab.

And of course that’s outrageously immoral. We should pay for our own goods and services. We have no right to push this off on somebody else. We should pass on to our kids a full treasury, not an empty one. We should pass on to them a debt-free society, not a society burdened with debt.

Charles McMillan, former government advisor, as quoted in the Guardians on Trial book:

The debt that has been left for the younger generation is a tragedy. It’s the first generation where there has been a reverse payoff, in the sense that normally parents pass on assets, education, home life and all that to their children. In effect what this generation has done is seize the assets from the next generation, and it’s called the government debt….This is part of the political resentment in huge portions of the population. A lot of people feel cheated. It shows that our political, bureaucratic and academic elite have let down this generation. There’s a fundamental issue here of ethics and morals. What possessed these people to put this kind of burden on the back of this generation?

For Further Study

Books

Days of Reckoning

Guardians on Trial

Videos

Days of Reckoning

We are now ready to examine how the debt problem arose in the first place. It all began with the growth of government in the 1960s and 1970s.