HNN Poll: The Bipartisan Flight from Reality

In the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine Peter G. Peterson--the former commerce secretary--blasts Republicans and Democrats alike for advocating policies that could bankrupt the United States, or at least foist trillions of dollars of debt on our children.

He notes that in just two years we have gone from a projected 6 trillion dollar surplus to a projected 4 trillion dollar deficit--a 10 trillion dollar swing in government finances: "

The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war. With total war, of course, you have the excuse that you expect the emergency to be over soon, and thus you'll be able to pay back the new debt during subsequent years of peace and prosperity. Yet few believe that the major drivers of today's deficit projections, not even the war on terror, are similarly short-term. Indeed, the biggest single driver of the projections, the growing cost of senior entitlements, are certain to become much worse just beyond the 10-year horizon when the huge baby-boom generation starts retiring in earnest. By the time the boomer age wave peaks, workers will have to pay the equivalent of 25 to 33 percent of their payroll in Social Security and Medicare before they retire just to keep those programs solvent.

Who's to blame?

Peterson says it's all those people who ignore reality. On the Republican side it's supply siders:

For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith.

So long as taxes are cut, even dissimulation is allowable. A new Republican fad is to propose that tax cuts be officially ''sunsetted'' in 2 or 5 or 10 years in order to minimize the projected revenue loss -- and then to go out and tell supporters that, of course, the sunset is not to be taken seriously and that rescinding such tax cuts is politically unlikely. Among themselves, in other words, the loudly whispered message is that a setting sun always rises.

What's remarkable is how so many elected Republicans go along with the charade. The same Republican senators who overwhelmingly approved (without a single nay vote) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to crack down on shady corporate accounting of investments worth millions of dollars see little wrong with turning around and making utterly fraudulent pronouncements about tax cuts that will cost billions or, indeed, even trillions of dollars.

On the Democratic side, it's the budget-busting spenders:

[T]he Democratic Party line often boils down to boosting outlays and damning the torpedoes. Likewise, Democrats regularly short-circuit any prudent examination of the single biggest spending issue, the future of senior entitlements, by castigating all reformers as heartless Scrooges.

Then, interestingly, Peterson tries to account for this "bipartisan flight from integrity and responsibility."

My own theory, for what it's worth, is that it got started during the ''Me Decade,'' the 1970's, when a socially fragmenting America began to gravitate around a myriad of interest groups, each more fixated on pursuing and financing, through massive political campaign contributions, its own agenda than on safeguarding the common good of the nation. Political parties, rather than helping to transcend these fissures and bind the country together, instead began to cater to them and ultimately sold themselves out.

Do you agree?