Ouch. Better not let the kids read this.

Dan Gillmor takes us to task for letting state and federal government push our debt onto our kids (excerpts):

Taxpayers let leaders off the hook on budgets

By Dan Gillmor - Mercury News Technology Columnist In politics, nothing succeeds like irresponsibility. It works wonders in the short term. Irresponsibility permeates the fiscal policies that now dominate in Washington and Sacramento. Last week, the Bush administration confirmed that the federal budget deficit would be the largest on record, and a few days earlier California's governor and Legislature enacted yet another smoke-and-mirrors budget. So America and its largest state continue our borrow-and-spend ways. We're only postponing the hard choices for others to make, but that's standard procedure. The federal situation is by far the more alarming. It begs for actual leadership. President Bush is leading, but the wrong way, and has reinforced how far we've come from the days when Republicans were the sensible ones. Peter G. Peterson, who served as Commerce secretary under Republican Richard Nixon, assails the administration in his bestselling new book, ``Running on Empty.'' It's not only the Republicans to blame, incidentally. Peterson also has tough words for the current spineless crop of congressional Democrats, many of whom have voted for the pad-the-rich Bush tax cuts and for spending bills that would have broken the budget even in good times. ....Back in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have mocked their budgetary promises. This is no surprise, given the horrible choices they face, but they were elected to lead, not dissolve into more of the same old backbiting and budgetary flimflam. Yet here we go again. The new budget does pretty much what the last one does -- pushing the day of reckoning into the future -- with a few cosmetic changes. California's state government will spend about $105 billion without raising taxes. To accomplish this, the state will cut programs slightly, make extravagant assumptions about revenue and borrow heavily. ....Looking for someone to blame, ultimately, for the federal and state fiscal woes? Start with the mirror. We don't seem to care enough about this to force honesty in budgeting, not to mention serious attention to deficit spending. We're loading big trouble onto our kids. They'll pay for our selfishness, via higher taxes, lowered living standards and/or inflation. They won't be happy when they realize what we've done.