Young: Fiscal storm raging; we're talking cosmetics

WACO, Texas — When the ladies on "The View" upbraid John McCain for fallacious claims. When Karl Rove, for goodness' sakes, says McCain commercials go too far. Things have gone too far.

Too far away from the issues voters ought to be discussing, about self-governance, about the world and nation we leave for our children. Instead, we talk about pigs and lipstick.

First, the week's distractions on "The View": When McCain appeared, Barbara Walters chided him for a phony controversy when he claimed that Barack Obama's "lipstick on a pig" was a sexist affront to the high-exalted governor from Alaska. Joy Behar assailed the McCain ad saying an Illinois bill authored by Obama mandated age-inappropriate sex education for kindergartners. No, it didn't. The bill was to protect against pedophiles by discussing inappropriate touching.

We interrupt that discussion to bring you this: Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan last week called this the worst U.S. economy he remembers, one that could "induce a series of events around the globe."

Greenspan also said the sweeping tax cuts proposed by McCain are untenable unless he intends to match them with budget cuts.

Indeed, with a $9.6 trillion national debt and combat forces on two fronts, citizens ought to question any tax cuts, from the candy-from-strangers allure of the "economic stimulus" checks, to the middle-class tax cuts proposed by Barack Obama.

Attention, please: We have bought much more government — foremost a military encircling the globe — than we were willing to pay for. And that means our children will pay for it. As we speak, "it" is growing in the tailspin of financial markets.

The housing crisis and the collapse of capital funds, like twisters spinning off from a larger storm, are byproducts of blind obeisance to financial deregulation.

The response, unavoidably in the cases of mortgage motherships Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is more debt.

So, what about the presidential race?

Both candidates would drive the nation deeper into debt if either followed through on his proposals. But lest one assume that the "tax-and-spend" Democrat would dig the hole deeper than he of the "party of austerity," the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said that McCain, with more sweeping tax cuts and an open-ended approach to Iraq, would pile up $3 trillion more debt through 2018 than Obama, who would spend more on health care and education.

Many voices of "fiscal conservatism" refuse to see the $407 billion federal deficit as a problem. The Heritage Foundation, which always has the ear of the GOP power structure, disputes the significance of the annual deficit. It points out that with the size of U.S. gross national product it's below the historical average. True. In that regard the largest historical deficit was 1983. Ah, Reaganomics.

What the Heritage analysis concedes is the high cost of servicing the debt. McCain says he'll freeze discretionary spending. One thing he can't freeze is the cost of interest on the debt. That represents 8 percent of total U.S. expenditures. The biggest pieces of the pie are so-called entitlements — Social Security and Medicare — two other things we aren't talking about when we argue about pigs and lipstick.

But the biggest piece of the discretionary pie (entitlements aside) is the military: 59 percent. The scandal is that what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't even included in the budget and isn't contributing to the deficit the Heritage Foundation pooh-poohs.

Do we really need Alan Greenspan to tell us this is a problem? Do we really need the ladies on "The View" to remind us how we are being manipulated and distracted? Of course, if you had a hand in such a mess, you'd want to distract people, too.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald.