by Frank James
Running for president means making many promises you can't keep, plain and simple. Further, it means making pledges you know or should know you can't follow through on and that many voters suspect you can't live up to.
Yet, every four years, presidential nominees tell voters, with some variations of course, what they think citizens want to hear -- that they'll cut taxes while increasing spending for programs deemed popular with one or another sought-after demographic of voters while decreasing it on others.
It's a strange courting ritual between voters and candidates. It's essentially bogus but no one has yet figured a way out of it.
So it's no surprise we're seeing both Sen. Barack Obama's and Sen. John McCain's campaigns offer fiscal proposals that don't add up to sound fiscal policy for the long term.
The New York Times offers a snapshot of this year's form of the peculiar and highly stylized ritual.
WASHINGTON -- While both presidential candidates enter the campaign's final week promising to be the better fiscal steward, each has outlined tax and spending proposals that would make annual budget deficits worse, analysts say, with Senator John McCain likely to create a deeper hole than Senator Barack Obama would.
Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, has proposed bigger tax cuts. He has also promised more in spending cuts, but he has not specified where most of them would come from. Even now that the financial crisis has given rise to one bailout package and prompted both candidates to call for billions more in stimulus spending, Mr. McCain has stuck by his promise to balance the budget by the end of his term, a pledge that fiscal analysts call unachievable.
Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival, has vowed to reduce the deficit and put it on a path to balance. He also promises an expensive effort to make health care insurance more widely available, a raft of other spending programs and tax cuts for most families and small businesses. He would raise taxes on the wealthiest households to help pay for his health care plans.
Neither presidential candidate has provided enough detail, especially about spending programs and what they would cut, for budget groups to put price tags on their agendas.
Conservative and liberal analysts agree that the next president should not be expected to balance the budget in his first term, because short-term deficit spending can stimulate the economy and the crisis is forcing the government to spend more in aid even as it collects less in taxes.
But for the long run, they say, the president's fiscal record will hinge on whether he can achieve the health care cost savings each promises, which in turn will help control the fast-rising expenses for Medicare and Medicaid. Neither candidate has a comprehensive proposal to address unsustainable growth in those programs.
"Neither one of them is being fiscally responsible," said David M. Walker, a former head of the Government Accountability Office who has long warned about the perils of deficits.
Walker, now at the Peter G. Peterson Institute, is a modern-day Jeremiah on fiscal policy, making it his mission to warn the nation of its irresponsibility and its pending day of reckoning. Many people agree with him, but you'd never know it based on the nation's continued trajectory towards an even greater fiscal crisis than the present one.
To a certain degree, the presidential nominees are doing what they must to get elected. As gifted as he was in politics, Ronald Reagan would have never gotten elected if he had promised to raise taxes, which he inevitably had to do to stave off fiscal calamity.
The Democratic presidential nominee who ran against Reagan in 1984 and did promise to raise taxes was Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter's vice president. Mondale, of course, lost in a landslide, winning his home-state of Minnesota.
If presidential candidates ever thought telling hard truths could get you elected to the White House before that, they didn't afterwards.
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