Associated Press:
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terrorism. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. A majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
More explicitly, according to federal figures, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare could increase the nation's $8.5 trillion debt more than fivefold in coming decades.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard a pitch about the urgency of fixing the economy by David M. Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity -- maybe Oprah -- to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
That's right, freakin' Oprah will save us. But what the hell, why not? Anyhoo:
To show that the looming crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation.
Can you honestly see a Republican saying, "We gotta raise taxes!" -- even if the Heritage Foundation's on board? Yeah, me neither. They'll merrily drive the economy right over a cliff, completely confident that there's no problem that can't be solved by tax cuts.
We need to do things the GOP doesn't like -- raise taxes on the wealthy, remove the cap on Medicare pay-ins, institute means testing for Social Security, and start living in the real world.
Tags: news politics taxes Social Security Medicare economy business financial
