In a recent paper, Robert Barro (1974) presented a model in which government debt and social security are not perceived by households to add to net wealth. From this it follows that neither government debt nor social security affects private capital accumulation. These important results contradict the modern theory of government debt' and recent contributions to the analysis of social security.2 Barro's emphasis on bequests is an important extension of the traditional life-cycle model. Nevertheless, the existence of such voluntary intergenerational transfers does not have the striking implication that Barro asserts. I will show in this note that Barro's conclusions follow instead from restrictive and empirically unwarranted assumptions. In a more appropriate model that includes bequests, the introduction or increase of government debt or of social security will reduce private savings and the equilibrium ratio of capital to labor. The framework of Barro's analysis is a static intertemporal model with overlapping generations of the type first presented by Samuelson (1958).