While Rome Burned....

If George W. Bush is C-Plus Caligula, then Bill Frist is undoubtedly Cat Killer Nero. For while the religious kooks are frothing at the mouth about gay marriage, contraceptives, and judges who don't do as they're told, and Bill Frist is preparing to do over a hundred years of Senate precedent simply so the mindless, grinning cultists of the Christian Right will vote for him for President in the 2008 primary, the U.S. economy is on the verge of collapse:

The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country's most pressing problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina.

While Washington plunged into a procedural fight over a pair of judicial nominees, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning Brookings Institution's economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to bemoan what they jointly called the budget "nightmare."

There were no cameras, not a single microphone, and no evidence of a lawmaker or Bush administration official in the room -- just some hungry congressional staffers and boxes of sandwiches from Corner Bakery. But what the three spoke about will have greater consequences than the current fuss over filibusters and Tom DeLay's travel.

With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.

"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."

"All true," Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.

"To do nothing," Butler added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."

Each of the three had a separate slide show, but the numbers and forecasts were interchangeable.

Walker put U.S. debt and obligations at $45 trillion in current dollars -- almost as much as the total net worth of all Americans, or $150,000 per person. Balancing the budget in 2040, he said, could require cutting total federal spending as much as 60 percent or raising taxes to 2 1/2 times today's levels.

Butler pointed out that without changes to Social Security and Medicare, in 25 years either a quarter of discretionary spending would need to be cut or U.S. tax rates would have to approach European levels. Putting it slightly differently, Sawhill posed a choice of 10 percent cuts in spending and much larger cuts in Social Security and Medicare, or a 40 percent increase in government spending relative to the size of the economy, and equivalent tax increases.

The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive -- and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: "If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be something to it."

Of course, this is all part of the Bush plan, isn't it? Eliminate Social Security and Medicare, eliminate protected pensions, eliminate the entire safety net, eliminate the burden of health care coverage from employers without doing anything to take its place other than perhaps issuing $1000 "vouchers" that people can use to pay for the $10,000 policies most of with employer-paid health care would pay to duplicate what we have. Then outsource all the good jobs, turn the entire middle class into a 1905-style rabble, and concentrate what little wealth is left into the hands of maybe 100 of the Bush family's closest friends.

Both my grandmothers lived to be 92. So that may mean I'll be around to see it happen. Oy vey.