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What Do We Owe Future Generations?, Neil H. Buchanan
What Do We Owe Future Generations?, Neil H. Buchanan
UF Law Faculty Publications
In the United States, it is common for legal scholars, economists, politicians and others to claim that we are selfishly harming "our children and grandchildren" by (among many other things) running large government budget deficits. This article first asks two broad questions: (1) Do we owe future generations anything at all as a philosophical matter? and (2) If we do owe something to future generations, how should we balance their interests against our own? The short answers are "Probably" and "We really are not sure." Finding only general answers to these general questions, I then look specifically at U.S. fiscal …