Spending Our Children's Money

My current, and I hope brief, 1992 fixation continues with this interesting presidential election debate from the day. How, on the strength of this performance, Clinton won that election is beyond me. Having said that, I recall watching it all on TV with an American friend of mine from Boston when I was at uni. and that I was as elated as she was when it became clear that Bill Clinton had triumphed. Political naiveté is the indulged privilege of callow youth, I guess.

The best part of this thing, though, is the Ross Perot explanation of the necessity for a gas tax to help to pay down the deficit. It was a great idea - for Americans - but it was ignored. A decade or so before this debate, when I was an American, gas was 48 cents a gallon. So Perot was right: there was room for relatively painless tax levies on gasolene and had been for years. Unlike in Britain. Petrol has always been expensive here, especially during Labour years, so hiking taxes on petrol even further to deal with a debt crisis has never really been a serious option for us - (until Brown!).

The real point is, though, that Ross Perot was a decent, patriotic old man who was rightly worried about debt levels in the US economy in 1992. No one listened to him then and his predictions have all come true now - in America and in Britain. For him it was morally wrong to "spend our children's money" to service our own or our government's economic incompetence and excesses. And he was dead right.

But we in Britain, thanks to Brown, have mortgaged our children's futures. Lunatics like him have made absolutely sure of that, for whatever ideologically, politically perverse reason.

The upshot is that in 2010 we now have a clear choice: either we try to limit the damage to our children's futures that Brown has caused and choose a period of conservatism (and Conservatism), or we risk burdening our children to the point of their despair by choosing Labour.

I made my mind up a long time ago. I went with the rational choice.

To eject this catastrophic Labour government, I pray that enough other people make the right choice too when the time comes - and choose Cameron.