Actually, liberals do want to pay for government programs... that's WHY democrats have a more favorable view of taxes; as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr said: "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."
Conservatives, on the other hand, don't want to pay for government. They consistently enact policies and tax cuts that hamper, disrupt, and destroy the machinations of a civilized society, while shirking the responsibility to pay for government, and foisting it onto future generations.... usually all the while complaining that government doesn't work.
Increase taxes, fixing the corporate tax system, and making cuts to our massively bloated military are positions that liberals take, and conservatives hate. The problem isn't with liberals here, it's with conservatives that, once again, hate government.
As for your actual debt bullshit, which is what it is, you're citing a radical conservative who want's to do away with medicaid, medicare, and health exchanges, and replace them all with vouchers; supports requiring banks and financial institutions to all be changed so they have no liability for the financial vehicles they sell; and eliminate the entire tax structure and replace it with the most regressive form of taxation in the misnamed "fair tax" flat tax system, where the poorest people are the most heavily taxed.
What this individual does is hype the "debt they're keeping secret" by trying to get people who don't understand basic (VERY BASIC) accounting to think it's all some sort of conspiracy. It's not; he's preying on the ignorance of those he talks to, most of whom probably already hate the government, and filling their heads with bullshit. In the most basic terms, there's two types of accounting for money you'd decided to spend: as you spend it, or all of it at once when you decide to spend it. BOTH are legitimate accounting methods. In the US, we account for it as we spend it. What this guy is saying is that we should be accounting for ALL of it the second we decide to spend it.
Why we don't do it his way: As an example, in 1996 Lockheed and Boeing were given contracts to produce concepts that were the first phase of the F-35 program. That's 1.5 billion dollars. If we had to account for the total cost of the F-35 program, as in HAVE THAT MONEY IN THE BANK, we'd have needed almost a trillion dollars right from the get go. Every time that the program is re-assessed, it's cost goes up... that would mean that every time those 100's of billions it's projected cost went up, we'd have to come up with RIGHT THEN. Nothing would ever get done, nothing would ever get started, because while that project might get underway for a smaller amount every year for a decade, coming up with that entire decades cost before anything was even started, and packing it away never to be touched, would be a massive waste of resources.
If you don't think i'm right, go rent an apartment. Figure out how many years you're going to be living there, then pay ALL those monthly rental costs up front. Or how about your electric bill. Sit down, figure out how much electricity costs you this last year... now figure out how long you're going to be alive and pay the electric company for all that electricity you're gong to use in your lifetime RIGHT NOW. That is as absurd as what this Kotlikoff's schtick is.
The biggest generational theft ever to happen is the tax cuts conservatives have enacted over the last 35 years that have caused the national debt to explode.
