How Federal Policies Mortgage the Future: New at Reason

Irene Triplett illustrates something politicians often forget: Decisions made for immediate purposes can reverberate for a long, long time.

During the Civil War, to bolster military recruitment, the U.S. government established pensions for veterans wounded in battle and widows of those killed. After the war, the system was repeatedly expanded to cover ever more beneficiaries, including men whose disabilities had nothing to do with their service in uniform. Congress eventually granted pensions to widows of Union veterans who married after 1890, then included all widows whose marriages had lasted 10 years.

In 1924, Mose Triplett, who had served in both the Union and the Confederate armies, married a woman who bore him a daughter named Irene. Born five years later, she is still getting survivor benefits from the Civil War, 153 years after it ended.

Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have dreamed that 21st-century Americans would still be paying for pensions created under him, writes Steve Chapman. But our current leaders, by contrast, know full well that the debt they are piling up today will be a burden on our descendants.

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