I’m looking for an intelligent, principled pragmatist

It’s clear we in America are in a very bad mess. And I don’t refer to the current business slowdown or recession or whatever it is politically correct to call it. Bad as it is, this current slowdown will seem trivial compared to the financial tsunami that appears to be coming.

Consider:

1) Our current Federal debt is about $11.4 trillion, or just under 90% of our entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product, a measure of the size of the entire annual America market).

2) The budgets currently projected by the administration almost double the Federal debt to about $20 trillion by 2015, just 5 years from now.

3) At the moment, the Federal government has to borrow almost half of what it spends each year. ($1.8 trillion borrowed out of a total 2010 budget of $3.55 trillion). The Federal government now spends just under 10% of its budget on interest payments alone (around $400 billion per year), and this is with low interest rates.

4) Projected Medicare/Medicaid costs (unfunded future obligations) are not counted in the budget. As currently constituted, Medicare is estimated to cost the Federal government $34 trillion over the next 75 years, and there is no plan to pay for it. Demographics are against us here. Currently there are 3.9 workers paying taxes into Medicare for every older American receiving services. By 2030, as the baby boom generation retires, that is projected to drop to 2.4 workers for each beneficiary. Yet Medicare spending is expected to grow by about 7 percent per year for the next 10 years, so while it is currently about 20% of the budget, in ten years it will be almost 100% of the budget.

5) And these are just the biggest issues, not even mentioning “minor” issues like the Social Security funding problem, the excessive farm subsidies, the gold-plated military contracts, the thousands of special-interest loopholes and giveaways and earmarks used to buy votes, the extremely generous benefits and wages won by public sector unions, and dozens of other bottomless sinkholes for our taxpayer dollars.

So clearly we are in trouble, and yet we have a political system that rewards promises for yet more expensive benefits (principally Democrats) or for cutting taxes (principally Republicans).

Some of our politicians are just stupid, or at least terribly naïve about economics, as when Democrats argue for more Federal health benefits when we can’t afford what we already have, or when Republicans push for tax cuts when the government already doesn’t have enough revenue to cover its costs.

Some of our politicians are blinded by their ideology, liberal or conservative, to the point where they can’t see (or don’t care about) the economic consequences of their proposals.

Some (perhaps most) of our politicians are just interested in getting elected or re-elected, and will tailor their message and promises to whatever will get votes in their distracts in the next election, whether it is good for the nation or not.

In the face of this, I sure would like to find a politician I can vote for who is

1) Intelligent, not stupid or naïve about economics or the government or foreign affairs

2) Principled, willing to do unpopular things that are in the best interests of the nation, even if they won’t get him/her re-elected, and

3) A pragmatist, not blinded by some social or political ideology, like most liberals and conservatives seem to be these days.

Lots of luck!