Pay attention here people!

The Do-Nothing Conspiracy
By David Brooks, March 19, 2005, The New York Times

If you want an image that captures what American politics will be like over the next few decades, imagine two waves crashing down upon us simultaneously, each magnifying the damage caused by the other.

The first wave is the exploding cost of the entitlement programs. The second wave is the ever-increasing polarization of the political class. The polarization will make it impossible to reach an agreement on how to fix the entitlements problem. Meanwhile the vicious choices forced on us by entitlement costs will make the polarization even worse.

The realities of the first wave - the looming fiscal crisis - are pretty well known. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will consume 14 percent of national output in 2030 and 21 percent in 2075 - up from about 8 percent today. Partly as a result, the federal government will have to come up with an extra $50 trillion just to pay for the promises it's made as of today.

To cover these costs, federal officials will have several options, all of them horrible. If they acted immediately, according to the economists Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale, they could increase federal income taxes by 78 percent; they could double payroll taxes; they could cut Social Security and Medicare in half; or they could do some combination. [emphasis added]

Tax increases on that scale would decimate the economy. Benefit cuts would cause pain. Doing nothing would lead to enormous deficits, an immobilized government, and stratospheric interest rates. It would mean the end of the United States as a great economic power.

The realities of the second destructive wave - polarization - are also widely recognized. They can be measured by the increase in party-line voting in Congress, the bitter political atmosphere in Washington, the political segmentation of media outlets and the emergence of rigid donor and activist bases in each party that use their power to inflict Stalinist party-line orthodoxy on potentially independent leaders. [snip]

I wouldn't be surprised if many of today's politicians decided to reorient their careers. I meet too many who are quietly alarmed by the looming fiscal catastrophe and who know that if their party doesn't tackle this problem, it simply won't be relevant to the issue that will dominate politics for years to come.

David Brooks is the other Times conservative. Amazingly, he’s saying what a lot of us have been saying for a long time. There is no free lunch. What smilin’ Ron Reagan started in the 1980’s has to stop somewhere or America as we know it will cease to exist. We have to pay our bills. Paying our bills means paying taxes. Taxes mean that our politicians must actually tell the citizens that they have to be responsible.

The last person to do that was Walter Mondale, who said that he wouldn’t rule out a tax hike. His opponent, George the First, said “Read my lips, no new taxes.” We know who won. Now our “leaders” routinely run on a policy of cutting taxes and convincing Americans that there really is a free lunch.

The bill for that lunch is coming due - the longer we put it off, the bigger it will be. The Chinese may be holding it.