Debt denialists: Democrats and Republicans fiddle while the balance sheet burns.

• Author: Welch, Matt

It was eight hours before the biggest media opportunity any Libertarian Party candidate had had in decades, and Gary Johnson was in a New York hotel room talking on the phone with Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron about the nuts and bolts of entitlement reform. "When it comes to Social Security," Johnson told his senior economic advisor as they rehearsed for a June 22 CNN town hall that would end up being viewed in more than 900,000 households, "I'm mimicking the lines from four years ago regarding raising the retirement age, fair means-testing, being able to self-direct as many funds as Congress would authorize...."

After wondering aloud whether even these reforms would prevent the Social Security Trust Fund from going "bust," Johnson arrived at his bottom line: The system as currently constituted is fiscally unsustainable. "That's the reality," he said, "and, you know, you can't run for this office and not speak that truth, in my opinion."

Johnson, bless his fiscally responsible heart, was confusing can't with shouldn't. Because one of the most ominous and overlooked developments of the head-spinning 2016 presidential election has been that the winning candidates were precisely the ones who steadfastly refused to speak the truth about how rapidly old-age entitlements are scarfing up the pie of federal spending. In fiscal year 2016, $2.47 trillion of the federal government's $3.66 trillion in non-interest expenses came from the "mandatory spending" categories of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Within a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), those figures are projected to grow to $4.14 trillion out of $5.7 trillion.

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In its latest Long-Term Budget Outlook, released on July 12, the CBO concluded that even near-term projections show publicly held debt (which is the national debt minus the debt held by government institutions) "growing larger in relation to the economy than ever recorded in U.S. history," from a current debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 75 percent (up from 39 percent as recently as 2008), to 86 percent in 2026 (higher than it has been since World War II), and then 141 percent in 2046 (wheeee!). Debt service alone is on pace to become the third-largest federal spending category during the next president's first term.

"Large and growing federal debt over the coming decades would hurt the economy and constrain future budget policy," the CBO warned. "The amount of debt that is projected... would reduce national saving and income in the long term; increase the government's interest costs, putting more pressure on the rest of the budget; limit lawmakers' ability to respond to unforeseen events; and increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis." That almost sounds like something worth mentioning during a presidential campaign!

Yet instead of addressing that reality, Donald Trump has campaigned as the Republican who would protect rather than tweak entitlements. "We're going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do," he said at a June 18 rally in Phoenix. "And your Medicare." How will the GOP nominee overcome the cruel logic of actuarial tables, which show that the ratio of workers paying into the system to retirees receiving transfers continues to plunge from 16:1 back when Social Security was launched to less than 3:1 now? Through a combination of "dynamic" economic growth and an always-vague promise to root out "waste, fraud, and abuse." As Steve Bell of the Bipartisan Policy Center told The Wall Street Journal in June, "Any notion of waste, fraud and abuse meeting our fiscal needs remains...silliness." Not just silly, but sad! "Trump's comments are just another kick in the stomach to all of us who have worked for more than 30 years for solvency for Social Security."

The Democrats, if anything, have been worse. Insurgent runner-up Bernie Sanders promised to expand, not contract, both Social Security and Medicare, and after long negotiations he helped push those planks into the Democratic platform, widely hailed as the "most progressive" in party history. It is now Hillary Clinton's official position to hike monthly Social Security benefits, boost cost-of-living increases, and reduce the age of Medicare eligibility, at least in terms of being able to "buy in" to the program, from 65 to 55. This at a time when mandatory spending plus debt service already accounts for around 70 cents of each federal dollar, in an era of historically low interest rates.

"After all," Clinton said in one of her biggest applause lines at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on July 28, "when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit!" Though the Democratic nominee was referring to glass ceilings for women, she may as well have been talking about the nation's debt ceiling, which, after being used as leverage to keep federal spending growth in check from 2011 to 2014, was quietly waved out of existence in October 2015 by the Republican-controlled Congress until after the 2016 election. Fiscal rectitude as even a rhetorical feint among major-party politicians has gone the way of the Whigs. The sky's the limit on how irresponsible we can get from here.

But don't tell that to Gary Johnson just yet. While his June 22 CNN performance was widely judged to be more face-plant than break-out, the Libertarian's response to naming "the greatest challenge facing our country's next president" eventually meandered near the vicinity of the bullseye: "I think it is the fact that government tries to accomplish too much, and in doing that, it taxes too much, and so we have some real issues with entitlements that--look, nobody is addressing the fact that there does need to be reform to Social Security, there does need to be reform to Medicaid and Medicare," Johnson said. "And that's not to say that we're not going to provide safety nets and provide...