Should young people join the tea party?

Niall Ferguson, historian of the financial crisis, is surprised that young voters support policies that make matters worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees

...the most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly 13 times the debt as stated by the US Treasury. Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.

These numbers are so staggering, that we have run out of adjectives and metaphors to describe them.