Over the last week, Barack Obama and many in Washington talked about the need to protect kids — a vital subject, to be sure.  However, while the political and media class seized on a horrific but exceedingly rare event to climb on a few hobby horses of their own, the biggest and most ubiquitous threat to the next few generations continued to get ignored.  Michael Ramirez puts that in perspective in his editorial cartoon for Investors Business Daily:

I’m not trying to minimize the horror of what happened last week, and neither is Ramirez. We should discuss and debate how best to protect schools from madmen, even if those events are extremely rare. But school security is ultimately a local issue.  We’re pushing the next few generations of Americans into economic slavery for own own greedy benefit today — or I should say our own greedy benefits, plural.  Washington can actually do something about this, since Washington is the cause of it.  Where is the demand to end deficit spending to protect the children, or even better yet, the demand for this generation to start paying down some of the $5 trillion in debt that the Obama administration has rung up?

As Glenn Reynolds is fond of writing, that which cannot be sustained … won’t be.

Also, be sure to check out Ramirez’ terrific collection of his works: Everyone Has the Right to My Opinion, which covers the entire breadth of Ramirez’ career, and it gives fascinating look at political history.  Read my review here, and watch my interviews with Ramirez here and here.  And don’t forget to check out the entire Investors.com site, which has now incorporated all of the former IBD Editorials, while individual investors still exist.