Sound Bites Drowning Out Needed Debate

Screaming at the television frightens the neighbors.

Yet I want to scream this political season.

When I see another 30-second sound bite or paid political message about some wedge issue designed to push people’s hot buttons, I want to scream, “Get real.”

Instead, I see the same old bunk flickering its way into the public debate, stuff pretending to be politically significant when it bears much more resemblance to the bottom of a cowboy’s boot.

It doesn’t matter that Rep. George Nethercutt bought a house in Washington D.C., just as Tom Foley did when he was in Congress.

Nethercutt supporters tried to make that an issue last time and now Nethercutt detractors are trying to make it an issue today.

Didn’t matter then, doesn’t matter now.

U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho gets a good round of applause when she talks about her Endangered Humans Act as a counter to the Endangered Species Act. It’s just another gimmick.

All the while, time is growing short this year to get to the big stuff. Indeed, time is growing short for the nation to get to work on it.

A good illustration of how Eastern Washington and North Idaho again are being tempted to substitute chaff for wheat can be seen in those TV ads about Medicare.

Big money, perhaps $500,000 or more by election day, will be spent with Spokane TV stations on ads that can send Idaho and Washington voters conflicting messages about Medicare and other entitlements.

The AFL-CIO and the Idaho Citizens Network first bought TV ads suggesting gloomily that Nethercutt and Chenoweth voted to cut Medicare and that this was very bad.

Nethercutt countered with his own ads suggesting lying has no place in politics and that he didn’t really cut Medicare, even though the dollars were fewer than what recepients previously had counted on.< But in 30 seconds, the issue really can’t be discussed very well as a frestrated Nethercutt has discovered.

More to the point, whether the GOP did, or didn’t cut Medicare misses the elephant-in-the-living room issue.

Unless both Medicare and Social Security spending are reined in and completely rethought the whole federal government will go broke or be forced to raise taxes hugely within a decade.

Peter Peterson, founding president of the Concord Coalition, recently outlined the sobering realities that await us just around the corner as the next president and the next Congress take office.

In less than 20 years, tax and withholding revenues used to fund both Medicare and Social Security will turn negative. Medicare goes into the red first, around the year 2002. Social Security hits red ink soon afterward, around 2013. If the nation continues to assume Medicare and Social Security will be available to the Nethercutt-Chenoweth generation when it begins to retire, American workers will have to give 35 percent of their wages and salaries to the government just to keep these two entitlements afloat. That’s more than twice the tax rate we pay today.

And who will get those benefits? As of today, about 40 percent of Social Security and 30 percent of Medicare benefits go to people whose current household incomes are higher than the national median.

To make matters worse, just as Social Security and Medicare begin to go bankrupt because billions are going to those who don’t really need help, the number of American households with no other savings for old age is expected to hit an all-time high of 4-in-10 households in the next decade.

To her credit, Judy Olson - Nethercutt’s challenger - has begun trying to talk about the real issue.

“I’m appalled that we are talking about putting a Band-Aid on Medicare, talking about tax cuts to the wealthy few, and not really having a bipartisan discussion about how to fix this problem,” she said a few days ago.

Olson’s idea would be to pull together legislators and experts from both sides of the political spectrum, bring in senior citizens, business leaders and young people and ask them to work together to figure out a way to keep entitlements from bankrupting the nation while still retaining a covenant to truly needy old people.

She’s talking about a process, a debate, a true discussion.

It isn’t sexy, but it matters.

It matters more than the fact that Nethercutt tried to undo the assault-weapons ban.

It matters more than the fact that Judy Olson supports a woman’s right to have an abortion.

If candidates were talking about other big issues, we could put off the talk about entitlements. But we’re not hearing about other big stuff, either. Instead, we get platitudes about waste, fraud and abuse, feel-good promises about lower taxes.

It’s sad.

No, it’s dangerous.

What’s at stake? Our own futures.

, DataTimes