Ohio State students who hope to find a job, buy a home, start a family and put down some roots over the next 20 years are about to bump into the personal nightmare of our national debt.

Now that health care reform has added a huge entitlement to our budget, the bond market is sending interest rates up rapidly. Congressional leaders know they have to do something before the ballooning debt consumes the country just as too much credit card spending can capsize a family budget.

But rather than freeze spending, stimulate growth and shrink the debt, these leaders are floating an idea that will metastasize into an unseen killer of opportunity. It’s called a value-added-tax.

Big-spending, vote-buying, entitlement-creating politicians love a value-added-tax because it collects tax money at every step of the production process with customers unaware of how much this tax adds to their price and most likely to blame the company not the Congress when the price of goods skyrocket.

The new tax is being debated because there’s no way the massive deficit can be allowed to keep growing. With universal health care about to hit the national budget, annual interest on the debt will soon top $500 billion. This huge $12.7 trillion national debt is already causing interest rates to rise, creating a huge barrier to recovery from the collapse of housing values, as these higher interest rates price more potential buyers out of the market.

But most troubling, especially to college-age voters who need a strong, opportunity-creating economy to produce career-starting jobs, a value-added-tax is tacit admission that Democratic leaders have no plan to create economic growth and cut the deficit with money from new taxpayers and their profitable investments.

A better idea is to look back to the 1990s when the Internet revolution created new companies, new jobs and new wealth that turned a half trillion dollar annual deficit into a surplus in rapid fashion. The value-added-tax idea tells us there will be no growth in the U.S. economy as the government plan is to take a much larger share of our collective economic output.

With the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts set to expire at year end, income taxes will go up, capital gains rates on investments will rise and stock dividends will go from a 15 percent tax rate to ordinary income rates, meaning most investors will see tax rates triple. When a VAT tax is added, citizens will have less money to spend on their own needs, business will decline even further and companies will have no need for new workers.

As the economy weakens, new university grads who can find employment will enter a job market where their up-to-date skill set is highly prized but lowly paid, as there will be many more applicants than openings. But other grads, no matter how highly skilled, will not find a landing spot in an economy that puts government growth ahead of economic opportunity. Moreover, minus the continuous improvement of the skills learned at OSU in the productive economy, much of the human capital acquired at high personal and economic cost will simply wither away unused.

There is no group of voters with more to lose from the creation of a huge new tax and massive federal government growth than students at OSU.