The deficit time bomb
A series on forgotten campaign issues
RARELY HAS a nation borrowed so heavily against the future as the United States does now and at the same time exhibited such extreme political partisanship. One example: the Roman Empire -- during its fall.
Peter G. Peterson, a Republican who was commerce secretary in the Nixon administration, points to that historic collapse even as he warns of the hole America is digging for itself. Record budget deficits are piling up while the baby boom generation begins leaving the work force, when they will stop paying into the Social Security and Medicare systems and start drawing them down.
Yet little is heard on the subject from George Bush or John Kerry.
Terrorism and nuclear proliferation will doubtless receive a lot of attention from the candidates during their first debate tonight, but runaway deficits, leaving the US beholden to foreign investors and freighting our children with debt, are also a serious threat. All of these issues deserve much more debate.
Earlier this year the International Monetary Fund issued a report that should have set off alarms, concluding, in Peterson's words, that the US government is "careening toward insolvency."
The peril be largely ignored by presidential candidates, says Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire, because the nation is preoccupied with Iraq and because both candidates "have very low credibility" on the deficit. Bush and Kerry both talk about halving the annual deficit in four or five years. Kerry at least advocates raising some revenue, but his proposed rollback of the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000 would be swallowed up by his healthcare plan, a worthwhile proposal, but leaving little for deficit reduction.
In fact, there are big differences on this crucial issue. The key date is Sept. 30, 2002, when the pay-as-you-go statute was allowed to expire. For most of its 12 years, PAYGO effectively required Congress to balance any major expenditures, whether new programs or tax cuts, with revenue increases or cuts in other programs to pay for them. PAYGO contributed to the big budget surpluses of the later Clinton years.
Kerry supported PAYGO, as he supported the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction bill as a maverick among Democrats in 1985. But the Republican Congress shucked off that fiscal discipline with the active support of the Bush administration.
Deficits were a major issue in 1992. Neither of the two major deficit hawks that year -- Paul Tsongas or Ross Perot -- won, but the debate created an effective mandate. This year, silence threatens to create a mandate for inaction. It is time for Bush and Kerry to step up and discuss the morality of leaving succeeding generations to pay off trillions of dollars in debt. TOMORROW: Planning for growth. 
