Briefly, Argument against Excessive Government Debt

The argument against the government running up an excessive debt to be paid off at some later date has always been both an interesting philosophical debate and a pertinent real-world one.  Does the government have any right to spend beyond the means provided it by its revenue?  I may follow up later with a more comprehensive argument, but for now I'm just going to share a passage from Tom Paine's Rights of Man, Part One that struck me as being particularly applicable to the topic.

"Man has no property in man. Neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.  The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence.  Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.  It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.  When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who chall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered." (The italics are Paine's). *

Now, I acknowledge that the specific topic which Paine addresses is NOT economic in nature, but rather whether or not the English monarchy has a hereditary right to rule over the English people.  However, he argues from the logical base that inter-generational control is invalid, and emphasizes this as a broad truth with the words "in any shape whatever".

By running up a debt, and especially one as large as the current one, the government is promising that the American people are responsible for paying it back at some point.  One might argue that the American government is responsible for this debt, not the people, but is not our government by the people and for the people?  Therefore, the operating budget for the government is limited to what it is allotted by the people through taxes.  However, according to the U.S. Treasury website, the United States has not had a balanced budget since the Eisenhower administration in 1957.  So already, the American taxpayer is responsible for a debt imposed by the previous generation, and is set to impose an exponentially larger debt on the next generation through the actions of the government.  I, personally, don't find this to be a tenable situation.

I believe remarks were also made about the unacceptability of imposing debt on future generations somewhere in the Federalist Papers.  I'll have to look it up.

*Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part One, p. 438