The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1971, lowered the voting age for Americans to 18. The inconsistency it addressed was exposed in a slogan common to the time: "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
Eighteen-year-old Americans were serving and dying for their country in Vietnam, but they weren’t allowed to vote for or against politicians who sent them there. Signed into law in July, the constitutional amendment was ratified faster than any in American history.
At its heart, the debate revealed a contradiction first exposed by the nation’s founders on the eve of revolution: Government’s power to conscript, and its power to tax and spend, derives only by the consent of the governed. Boston revolutionary James Otis said, "taxation without representation is tyranny."
Since then, suffragists and civil rights activists have expanded the franchise on the essential American premise that a government cannot compel to action those who have had no part in choosing that government. Abigail Adams urged her husband to advocate for women’s voting rights, arguing that women "will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."
Martin Luther King Jr. echoed those sentiments generations later from his Birmingham jail cell: "A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law."
It is worth considering this basic principle as our federal government closes rapidly on $10 trillion in national indebtedness. Since 2001, our leaders in Washington have conspired to borrow, spend and promise at levels never before seen in American history – levels so high as to seem almost laughable, if the subject weren’t so terrifying. The country has borrowed before, but never like this. Because we are no longer just indebting ourselves: We are indebting our children.
The Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker, recently quit his job years before the 15-year term expired. Walker, the nation’s top accountant, crusaded for years to stop Congress’s runaway deficit spending. He toured the nation on a "fiscal wake-up tour" with allies left and right to warn the country that its leaders were spending away our children’s future. He decried accounting practices in Congress that would land anyone in the private sector in jail. He blasted Republicans for falsely arguing that tax cuts magically pay for themselves, and he lambasted Democrats for standing in the way of entitlement reform.
Finally, fed up with a Congress that would not listen, he threw up his hands and left for the private sector, where he vows to continue his crusade heading the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
What Congress has already done to our children is damning. Each teenager entering the workforce next year will assume a $450,000 debt over the course of their lives to pay for our current debt and future promises in Social Security and Medicare. That’s far more than the average American mortgage – except there is no house to back up this debt. And it gets worse each year: Congress has already added a half-trillion dollars to the national debt since last fall, and projects at least $400 billion more this coming year.
And they’ve done it in the most immoral of ways, with Enron-style accounting and outright deception. If you don’t believe Walker’s warnings, ask yourself this: How can Congress tell us that the annual deficit last year was only $177 billion, while in just six months time we have added $500 billion to the national debt? You don’t have to be an accountant to understand that those numbers just don’t add up.
Rather than address the crisis, Congress votes year after year to make it worse. Republicans tried to buy votes in 2003 by passing a massive expansion of government-run health care, Medicare Part D; Democrats violated their own "pay-go" standards in late 2007; and both parties borrowed from our children for "stimulus" checks many Americans will receive this spring and summer.
Tomorrow’s generation will face enough challenges already. Already each college student graduates with an average of $20,000 in student debt, and those going to graduate school will finish with six figures in loans. The threats of radical Islamic extremism aren’t going away, and the country will continue to face economic challenges from India and China.
In Washington’s farewell address, he warned Americans to avoid national indebtedness and the immorality of "throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear." He would recognize what our government is doing today for what it is – taxation without representation.
Which leaves us with one of two possible solutions: Stop spending our children’s money, or let them vote. The latter is impractical, and the former is necessary.
Either way, the solution requires new leadership in Washington.
Jim Burkee is an associate professor of history at Concordia University in Wisconsin and is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congressional seat held by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner.
