Tunnel Vision

Timothy Noah suggested this morning that we should judge the winner of tonight's debate on domestic issues entirely on who would best reduce the deficit:

President Bush has taken the balanced budget left him by President Clinton and turned it into a $422 billion deficit. Not bad for a conservative! ... Tonight, whenever either candidate mentions a domestic-policy proposal, ask yourself the following question: "Will this cost the government a lot of money?" If the answer is "yes," feel free to tune out discussion of the proposal's substance. ... Instead of trying to master the details of complicated new proposed initiatives, focus on the following question: Which of these guys will do a better job cleaning up the horrible fiscal mess left behind by President Bush's first term? ... compare Bush's $2 trillion to $4 trillion in new costs to Kerry's $1.27 trillion.

In light of the "liberal" spending spree Bush has authorized and Kerry softens, perhaps we should be shocked that the guy furthest to the left has the only genuinely different ideas on how to attack the budget – and Ralph Nader won't even be on stage tonight.

Public Citizen, a group launched by Nader in 1971, estimates that switching to universal, single-payer health care "could save at least $286 billion annually on paperwork, enough to cover all of the uninsured and to provide full prescription drug coverage for everyone in the United States." Nader's the most popular candidate (that's relatively, of course) to endorse this system and advocate cutting the defense budget. And I can't envision he would sign legislation granting $143 billion in corporate tax cuts in an effort to circumvent a WTO order and bolster congressional incumbents' local races. (Incidentally, are these the same loopholes Kerry talked about? I'd have to think Kerry just lost ground there, unless there are more loopholes out there.)

Nader's fond of saying things like, "This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies." If the deficit were the only question on the board, Noah might have to urge debate viewers to look elsewhere for answers.