It seems that the Opposition is claiming that each baby born in Britain will be carrying £17,000 of the national debt. Now, this does seem to me a rather simplistic way of looking at things.
Firstly, of course, the national debt has been built up - in part - from financing infrastructure projects. The child that is born today benefits from the infrastructure that already exists. As such, deficit spending can benefit the next generation by giving them assets that they can use. Additionally, deficit spending used to soften a recession is also a good thing. Would it be better for a child to be born to parents who were unemployed or to parents who were in work due to a fiscal stimulus? The child would, surely, be better off to be born to working parents. It would have a more affluent upbringing and, perhaps, be inculcated with a work ethic from seeing the good example of its parents going out to work.
In practice, therefore, a national debt is far from being an automatically bad thing. In many cases it is good. As such, it is simplistic to criticise it without explaining what services you would rather not provide in order to keep it down.
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