Tag: austerity

Tabatha Southey’s column today addresses the claim that we should run a country as if it was a household. A country’s debt can, in complete fairness, be passed along to its children, because that is exactly what happens to a country’s assets. An educated population, for example, is an asset to a country in a vast number of ways: Educated people earn more, so they pay more taxes. They tend to get sick less and go to prison less often and so they cost the state less money and, as study after study has shown, educated parents tend to raise educated children, and so education is a very solid long-term investment for a nation to make. Every time a politician makes the seemingly sensible point that everyone makes sacrifices to live within their means and therefore so must governments (as politicians from Washington to Toronto have done this week), someone needs to point out that if individuals choose to sacrifice going to university, it would be mostly a bad choice. You can make similar arguments about other kinds of investments. A government that spends money during a recession to rebuild decaying infrastructure not only creates jobs today, providing an immediate…