Last week in his This Week in Congress newsletter, Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, expressed some concern about the stimulus package and the borrowing necessary to make it possible. When it came up for a vote, though, Moran went ahead and voted in support of the stimulus and borrowing package.

Maybe he should have stuck with his original hesitation.

To see why he was pretty much right in the first place, let us begin by thinking about a comparison on the personal level. If you were to borrow $500 per person in your family, would that be a right and responsible thing to do? Well, it depends.

It seems to me like there are at least four different types of thing we might do with that money, and the rightness of borrowing the money to spend it depends upon which way we would use this money.

First, some people are really truly needy, and spending it on these real and true needs seems to be morally responsible. When I say "really truly needy," I am drawing on a rough division of our wants into three categories: the most basic needs are those needs we have just to stay alive. Then there are "standard of living needs" -- those things we need if we are to continue to live at the level of comfort and security to which we have become accustomed. And finally there are "desired needs" -- things we strongly desire and think we need, though their possession would not add even to our standard of living.

So if you are borrowing money -- even without an intention of repaying it -- because you have to do so to put bread on the table for your child, then you are right to do so. Some people need the money that badly. For them, the stimulus package is justified.

But most of us do not need the money for needs that are that basic. Most of us would fall into a second category and use the money for the less immediate type of needs. In fact, the president seems to hope we would spend the money as soon as possible, and spend it on consumer goods, things that we could go out and buy tonight.

Are you justified in borrowing money that you are unlikely ever to be able to repay for something that you don't need all that badly? Probably not.

So Moran was probably right to be concerned.

A third use of the borrowed money is possible, however. Sometimes we borrow money so we can become more productive. A teenager might borrow money to buy a lawn mower and start a summer lawncare business, for example.

At a national level, building infrastructure and putting money into research and development would be the parallels to buying the lawnmower.

This sort of stimulus package could be morally responsible, but it is not the one that the government has proposed. So their package cannot be justified on these grounds.

A fourth category, or maybe it is only a variation on the third, focuses on using our resources now so that we do not have use as many scarce resources in the future.

If you are hiking in the desert, for example, and you discover that you have only enough water for three hours, shouldn't you use those three hours to get yourself to a permanent water supply? You want to move beyond the scarce resource you have so that you can continue to meet basic needs in the future.

Similarly, we now know that many of the resources we have -- petroleum being the most obvious one -- are going to run out soon. Beyond meeting our current basic needs, the most morally weighty use of our resources -- including those we have to borrow -- would be to get to a place where we are not short of basic resources anymore.

The government cannot stimulate all of us to lead the types of life that we should, lives that are purposeful and sustainable. But if it is going to borrow money in our names and commit our children to paying off the interest on it, that money should either be used to take care of our basic needs now or to work on meeting them in the future.

I wish Moran had trusted his original thinking.