The deficit isn't sexy. There's no use pretending it should be. But it falls to public figures and writers to make unsexy issues tolerable, at minimum. So I appreciate the effort Matt Yglesias put into his article "Debt and the Millennials," which builds a succinct frame for understanding the deficit debate. I agree with just about every part of the post:



-- Since the problem is overwhelmingly one of projected future increases in spending, it's perfectly reasonable to expect that the majority of change relative to baseline will come on the spending side.

-- But since the problem is overwhelmingly one of the growing cost of longstanding commitments, rather than new commitments, it's absurd to expect the change to be entirely on the spending side.

-- What you spend on and what you tax matters more than "how much" you spend and tax. Taxing pollution and reducing expenditures on bombs has very different implications from taxing labor and reducing expenditures on school construction.

-- It's absurd to be spending large and growing sums of money preventing people from moving here while simultaneously facing a Social Security shortfall driven primarily by unexpectedly slow population growth.

-- Young people should push, at the margin, for any cuts in Social Security/Medicare spending to be implemented sooner rather than later. Proposals to let everyone born before 1955 evade any cuts forever are unreasonably punitive to the youngest generation and yet are universal dogma in DC. Complain about this!

