Amid the hoopla of the presidential campaign last week, as candidates were delivering their hopeful economic messages, a dull missive from the government’s bean counters landed with a thud:
The White House Budget Office said it expects next year’s federal deficit to hit a record $482 billion, and that doesn’t count the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add those costs and the deficit grows to well over half a trillion dollars. It will grow larger still if Treasury has to bail out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
A half-trillion dollar deficit casts considerable gloom over the hopeful talk of the presumptive presidential candidates. It makes Republican John McCain’s tax-cutting plan look like fiscal lunacy. It makes Democrat Barack Obama’s plans for near-universal health care coverage look like wishful thinking.

Mr. McCain wants to remove the expiration dates on the tax cuts that were enacted in the early years of the Bush administration and also cut other taxes on individuals and businesses. That would shrink Uncle Sam’s revenues by $600 billion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. If Mr. McCain also continues the war in Iraq, the deficit will turn monstrous.
Mr. Obama has advocated raising taxes on well-off people, mainly those making more than $250,000 per year, while trimming taxes for people with modest incomes. His plan would add $800 billion to tax collections over 10 years, but his plans for near-universal health coverage easily could eat that up.
And aside from any new tax cuts or new programs, the nation also faces the reality that the first of the baby boom generation begins retiring this year. No matter who is elected president, he will face growing costs for Medicare and Social Security. And history indicates that the stumbling economy will leave more people qualifying for Medicaid health coverage as well.

The most frustrating thing about the deficit is that it’s back: We thought we’d solved this problem in the 1990s. A rare period of fiscal discipline in Washington, combined with a modest tax increase and a booming economy, lifted the budget into surplus for four years. The United States actually began paying down the national debt.
In 2000, Bill Clinton’s last year in the White House, the government took in more than $200 billion more than it spent. It took the Bush administration only one year to blow that surplus.
The 2001 recession, which coincided with the need to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, played a role in that. But the main culprit was an official policy of profligacy. President George W. Bush engineered two deep tax cuts while increasing federal spending. Then he plunged us into the Iraq morass at a cost of roughly $100 billion a year. All of this happened with the connivance of Congress.

Interest payments on the national debt represent 9 percent of the federal budget. That’s twice what the federal government spends on education and three times what the government spends on medical and scientific research. It equals the spending on federal aid programs from food stamps and school lunches to housing assistance, unemployment insurance, aid for the disabled and the earned-income credit.
Universal health care and the boomers’ retirement would be much easier to finance in future years if we had not burdened the nation with debt — debt bought up mainly by overseas investors, often Asian central banks, in the form of U.S. Treasury bills. The government of China is one of America’s largest creditors. Instead of having money to provide Americans with health insurance at home, we’re making interest payments to China.
“Deficits don’t matter,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously said late in 2002. They do, and it would be nice to hear Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama address that fact.