American Maggie

Three in five young people support the President.  Nearly seven in ten young voters voted for him.  Obama is himself a relatively young politician.  He eschewed AARP for an Usher event, and reaped dividends as first-time young voters delivered Iowa for candidate Obama.  Young voters loved Obama, and many still do.  But now that he’s President, he is legislating against the clear interests of his strongest supporters.

The President has done nothing to shore up our failing social security system, which robs from the young to feed the old.  The President proposes penurious taxes, and encroaches each day on private enterprise by making himself the leader of cars, banks, and perhaps, whether you’re eligible for a lung transplant.  The President sets up the young people in the military for failure, denying commanders the spending and troops necessary to win in Afghanistan and setting false deadlines.  The one legislative proposal leaning towards the aid of young people is the student loan forgiveness program—the President has offered a limited student loan forgiveness plan.  But even this plan betrays the overall interests of young people by contributing to the explosion of the deficit.

The deficit serves as a tax on the young, because it will be ours to pay.  These payments may come due sooner than anyone expects.  As economist Martin Feldstein has observed, President Obama’s policy proposals may result in a deficit equal to our entire gross domestic product as soon as 2019.  Chief among these fiscally disastrous proposals is the President’s health care plan.  But the expenditures don’t stop there.  The first bailout. The second bailout. The strong-arming of financial institutions, the frantic wallpapering of the Motor City with Benjamins.  In the short term, this means we may once again have to remodel the National Debt Clock billboard to add new digits.  It also may mean interest rates on everything from mortgages for a first home to the student loans the President seemed to help us with, will increase.  The government will need to dedicate greater and greater amounts to service our massive debt, offering less and less for innovation and discovery. 

Where is the opportunity, the hope and change for young people?  Young people are dramatically more unemployed than other age groups.  To see a cautionary tale of what a socialist state does to the young, we need only look at the case of France.  In this current recession, youth unemployment , that is unemployment of those aged 20 to 30, is significantly higher than older demographics.   And young people’s ability to employ themselves will be threatened by government overreaching too.  How far off is the day when the sheer cost of legal advice to surmount government red tape starts choking off the startups of 20-year-old entrepreneurs?  Young people would do well to heed warnings about increase of government power if they ever seek to start a business, get a mortgage, or exercise choice in health care without the intervention of a bureaucrat.

Young voters need to take a hard look at their devotion to the President.  As a young voter, ask yourself– are you in a bad relationship with your President? Does he promise and promise and never come through? Does he make more and more decisions with less and less conversation?  Do you pick up the tab over and over and know that you’ll never see a penny of that back?  There is an answer.  Call your President. Tell him, “Honey. We need to talk.”  

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Paloma A. Zepeda is a third year law student at Harvard Law School, where she is Editor in Chief of the Latino Law Review.  She blogs at bikinipolitics.com and tweets at @p_dove.

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