Conservatives have long been able to take some comfort in the fact that government entitlements, despite their spotty achievement record and growing strain on the national budget, have generally been limited to certain segments of the population. Whether it’s the elderly, college students, veterans, or the poor, one has to fit a certain demographic to feed from the public trough.

Not any more. For the first time since Social Security, we have a new proposal for every child born in this country: the baby bond.

Proposed by the editors of Time magazine earlier this summer, the baby bond would be a $5,000 savings bond invested, in some vehicle to be determined, for each child at birth. When the child reaches age 18, he or she could access that money for college tuition or a new house. Time likened it to the old GI Bill for college funding – a way to invest in the country’s future.

Senator Hillary Clinton voiced her support for the idea last week. She feels that the program would help people get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, but has become harder to accomplish for most Americans due to rising college and housing costs.

Of course, nothing invokes those old fashioned American traits of saving and fiscal responsibility quite like a government handout, much in same way that per-child Welfare credits engender sound family planning. By this line of thinking, letting a child eat unlimited Twinkies will teach him to moderate his intake of sweets, and giving a 16 year-old a Lexus for her birthday will impart a valuable lesson on hard work.

Brilliant!

Blake Zeff, a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, said the baby bonds program "is not a firm policy proposal but an idea under consideration." As such, they have offered neither estimates for its costs nor proposals for how it would be funded.

If Democrats are serious, however, they had better start crunching some numbers. Their promised list of goodies is racking up quite a price tag and “rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy” is quickly becoming more of a slogan than an actual way to balance the books. How can we shore up Social Security? Roll back the tax cuts. How can we provide universal health insurance to every American? Roll back the tax cuts.

And I could cut back on my cable bill, but it’s not going to pay for a house on the Jersey shore.

With roughly 4 million children born each year in this country, the easy math gives a figure of $20 billion. Since the costs of government entitlements are often grossly – if not deliberately – underestimated, we should count on several times that. Changing demographics have wreaked havoc with Social Security’s cash flows and we should expect similar surprises for the baby bond system.

The cost issue aside, the management of such a program would rival Social Security in its bureaucracy. With millions of young adults laying claim to their bond every year, it would ludicrous to assume that each individual case will fall into tidy categories of “yes or no” for college tuition or a down payment on a home. Sorting through the particulars of each claim – and ensuring that the money went to its stated purpose - would be a Herculean task.

What if the person turns 18 and relocates abroad to start her life? Does she still get the money to buy a house in Canada? If so, what “investment” have we made in this country’s future? Does the son of a millionaire get to claim his bond? And are the children of illegal immigrants entitled as well? (If so, somewhere in Colorado, Tom Tancredo is already seething.)

Indeed, the questions are legion. And the comparison used by Time falls short because, in the case of the GI Bill, one has to apply to get the loan from a pool of funds. With baby bonds the money, in theory, already “belongs” to a specific individual. This would make Uncle Sam the executor to tens of millions of trust funds – an entirely different dynamic from the simple tuition loan.

This does not deter the rosy view of the baby bonds' supporters. "I think it's a wonderful idea," said Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an Ohio Democrat has endorsed Clinton for president. "Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until they’re 18?"

Ms. Jones is clearly delighted by the plan, but her logic escapes me. The per capita national debt is nothing to shrug at, and it certainly would not be helped by another $20 billion plus in federal entitlements. Her philosophy seems to be, “we’re already blitzed, so why not have another Mai Tai?”