The Columbus Dispatch

We’ll be cleaning up Trump’s mess for generation­s

- Catherine Rampell writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. crampell@ washpost.com

of a warming planet, of the intensifyi­ng hurricanes and droughts and migratory crises that will ensue? Who will bear the cost of chemicals in our drinking water and more pollutants in our air?

Why, of course, millennial­s, our children and those who will come after us.

Or think about Trump’s unfunded tax cut, which, at its core, is a huge intergener­ational transfer of wealth toward the old and away from the young.

It offers the biggest benefits to high earners, who are disproport­ionately older workers since earnings peak around age 50. And despite the administra­tion’s laughable claims that the tax law will pay for itself through added growth, every single independen­t budgetary model finds that it will massively swell the debt.

The Congressio­nal Budget Office estimates it will increase our federal debt by about $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

Who will be stuck paying that tab, through some combinatio­n of higher taxes and reduced government services?

You guessed it: millennial­s, our children and those who will come after us.

Other regulatory changes cheat the young to profit their elders. Amid the flurry of Trump tweets and pornstar scandals, many of those changes have received scant attention.

With virtually no coverage, for instance, Trump’s Education Department announced on Friday it would once again delay a rule that would force colleges to disclose how their alumni fare in the job market. This makes it more difficult for students to make informed decisions about what kinds of vocational programs, particular­ly at marketing-savvy for-profit schools, will help them land a job.

Who will be left with mountains of student-loan debt, after chasing degrees and certificat­es that turn out to be worthless?

Not to sound like a broken record, but millennial­s, our children and those who will come after us.

Trump has proved himself intent on wrecking our planet, our national creditwort­hiness and our chance at a more-functional higher-education system.

Now, to the detriment of future generation­s, he’s tarnishing Brand America itself.

In spring 2017, Pew Research Center surveyed residents of 37 countries about their views on the United States. It found that, in almost every country, our image had deteriorat­ed. In fact, in more than half of the countries surveyed, positive views of the United States experience­d double-digit drops from a year earlier.

And those results are from relatively early in Trump’s tenure.

Since then, he has thrown tantrums on the internatio­nal stage, alienating and aggravatin­g our military allies, both at the Group of Seven gathering and now almost daily on Twitter.

He has publicly pandered to presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, as well as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other thugs, dictators and humanright­s violators.

He praises as “very talented” North Korea’s totalitari­an leader Kim Jong Un, who starves and imprisons millions of his people and has murdered members of his own family.

But the greatest damage to our internatio­nal image likely comes from the stomach-churning cruelty that this erstwhile “nation of immigrants” is now inflicting upon asylumseek­ing families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Photos of weeping toddlers and stories of babies being ripped from their mothers’ breasts are now zipping around the world, putting the lie to any past statements that U.S. officials had made about Americans’ concern for internatio­nal human rights. The United Nations’ high commission­er for human rights has personally condemned the Trump administra­tion’s policy of separating children from their parents, calling it “unconscion­able” and “abuse.”

Trump and his administra­tion are traumatizi­ng thousands of innocent children, leaving emotional scars that may never heal.

On a broader scale, Trump is also destroying any good will the United States has built in the internatio­nal community over the decades, as well as any standing we had to encourage less-enlightene­d states to behave better.

Once again, it will be millennial­s, our children and future generation­s who must live with the consequenc­es.

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