The fairness issue won't go away.

• Author: Rock, James M.

We must decide whether our immediate economic prosperity is worth mortgaging our children's future.

THE BUMPER STICKERS are right--we are spending our children's inheritance on ourselves. What they don't say is that this selfishness is compounded by lies. The size of the national debt is used as the reason for not voting to aid the most disadvantaged segment of American society--the "voteless" children. The start of a new presidential term is the perfect time to do a national priorities check. The current debate over the burden of the U.S. debt and twin budget and trade deficits is more about human values than economics. What is society's responsibility to increasing the standard of living of all American youngsters? Do they have a right to one better than ours, or at least as good? Or is their right merely to survive, or even less?

Providing jobs for present and future generations of children should be the number-one priority in meeting societal responsibilities, not a balanced budget or stable prices. The myopic focus on these two has led to a dramatic concentration in fewer and fewer hands of national and international income and wealth.

This country is so rich that we can afford to do anything we really want to. The era of "American brag" isn't over unless we become so obsessed with the burden of the debt and twin deficits that we make ourselves believe it. Herbert Stein, former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, made a similar comment: "It is almost as if the American people were obsessed by the fact that everybody bears the burden of 15 pounds of atmospheric pressure per square inch (at sea level, of course)."

Because of this debt burden focus, the land of democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and limitless opportunities increasingly is portrayed as a nation of debt-ridden big government and restricted choices. It is true that throughout peacetime history, until the Great Depression of the 1930s, a balanced budget was the 11th commandment of the government. However, in the Employment Act of 1946, Congress and Pres. Harry S. Truman accepted ultimate responsibility for the U.S.'s economic performance. "The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal government . . . to promote maximum employment, production [economic growth], and purchasing power [stable prices]." Balancing the international trade account was not added as an additional goal for a decade or so, because this nation ran such a huge trade surplus during World War II.

The media jokes about looking to economists for a solution to America's current and future fiscal woes, but never getting less than two. It is no joke. Economists either emphasize stable prices through market efficiency and free trade or stress full employment through government policies to promote more equality of opportunity as their key goals to bring about economic growth.

During the Depression, John Maynard Keynes, the father of Keynesian economics, espoused governmental interventionist policies as a means of saving capitalism from itself by moderating its rapacious acquisitive tendencies. Much of the dispute over the need for government spending he had with the then dominate (classical) economists was about the relative seriousness of the dangers posed by unemployment and inflation. This is the same dispute their apostles--Keynesians of different stripes vs. neoclassicals-monetarists-rational expectationists--are having now.

Unemployment and inflation both are economic ills, but they...