In favor of anti-intellectualism: Let sleeping intellects sleep

As a faculty member still haunted by memories of the turbulent 1970s, I am alarmed by the ongoing efforts to kindle more intellectual curiosity among Princeton students. Why not let sleeping intellects sleep?

In the dark days of the 1970s, our students' intellect routinely roamed into affairs best left to seasoned adults. Students spoke vocally on our nation's domestic and foreign policies. They crashed many important campus committees, including Princeton's utterly adult budget committee. Worst of all, they routinely hung around the podium after class for intellectual discourse upon such matters, often forcing me to miss lunch with my colleagues. Students today would neither dare, nor care, to waste my time on such discourses, and that suits me just fine.

Missed lunches, of course, would not even be the worst consequence of an intellectual renaissance among our students. What if intellectual curiosity drove them to stumble upon the never-ending, debt-financed garden party the baby boom generation has been throwing for itself, hoping that the next generation (our students) will pick up a good part of the tab?

The garden party whereof I speak began as early as 1981, when the federal government embarked upon a giant, debt-financed combination tax-cut and spending binge. Within the span of that feel-good decade, the federal debt quadrupled, from about $1 trillion in 1980 to $4 trillion by 1990.

A good part of that debt is owed to foreigners, who have lent it to us through a never-ending series of still growing "Current Account" deficits. This year, for example, our nation's total spending exceeds its homegrown gross domestic product by about 5 percent, or about $500 billion. Should that money inflow ever stop, we would be forced to finance our garden party fully with our own GDP — a totally un-American thought! It would drive interest rates through the roof and, as our students would put it, become "like, a real buzz-kill." Lets hope that, if it that "buzz kill" ever comes, it does on their and not our watch.

To be sure, President Clinton, a veritable social deviant in fiscal policy, did begin his presidency with a tax increase designed to cut the federal deficit, and he eventually did turn it into a surplus. Thus, in January 2001, when his term ended, it was believed that the nation was looking at a cumulative future surplus of $5.1 trillion for the period 2001-2010. That figure, of course, was just a product of the baby boomers' fertile imagination, fueled by the many tall tales they had told one another in the 1990s.

For one, the projected $5.1 surplus was based on economic assumptions literally too good to be true. Even the chronically inebriated baby boomers eventually did come to realize it could not forever fool itself with Disneyland accounting and Wall Street's utterly mindless asset valuations. Already before September 11, 2001, it began to dawn on the few sober among them that the $5.1 trillion prospective surplus would never materialize.

Second, that $5.1 trillion figment of the baby boomers' imagination included a $2.5 trillion prospective surplus of the Social Security Trust Fund, and another half trillion or so of cumulative Medicare surpluses. These trust fund surpluses arise every year as the payroll-tax payments into the funds exceed payments made from them. In principle, we should invest these surpluses. We could invest them in Euro-bonds (dollar denominated bonds bought by foreigners), leaving these foreigners' children to pay taxes to pay off the bonds to America when they come due twenty or so years hence. Alternatively, we could invest them in the U.S. economy, by paying off currently outstanding U.S. Treasury debt held by private pension funds. The latter would then reinvest the money, largely in the private U.S. economy. It would raise the nation's capital stock and hence the productivity of future workers, our students among them.

Trust our partying, debt-addicted baby boomers not to use the trust fund surpluses in this prudent fashion. Instead we have treated them as spendable funds for current government operations: for the salaries of civil servants and the military, homeland security, subsidies to farmers (sometimes to induce them not to grow food), ammunition for the war, and so on. But even after using up all of the surpluses in the trust funds, we still pile more debt on top. In fiscal 2004, for example, we shall add at least another $300 billion (and probably more) to the total federal debt, even after blowing the year's entire Social Security and Medicare surpluses. Thus, the party goes on.

Does it makes sense for my generation to awaken our children's intellect to this delicious scam, possibly morphing millions of hitherto passive, web-addicted and often binge-drinking "organization kids" into a legion of proverbial skunks at the garden party? Why not just let the little suckers be — sweet and otherworld oriented, as they now are?