Stupid Season: American politics is getting dumber even as fiscal catastrophe looms larger.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Interest rate on federally guaranteed student loans

As APRIL TURNED into May, the political class spent the better part of one week furiously missing the point. Instead of a debate about whether America's battle against Islamic extremists was going well, whether the Pentagon's extensive activities across the Muslim world were making the country safer, or whether a country with $15 trillion in debt could continue accounting for almost half of the world's military spending, the foreign policy flap du jour centered around whether presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had been sufficiently gung ho in 2008 about sending assassins into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden and whether President Barack Obama's choice to "spike the football" with a campaign ad celebrating the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden's death was inappropriately political.

This meaningless, backward-looking debate--on which I dutifully weighed in for cable news and talk radio (if they ask, I will come!)--at least had the virtue of being somewhat related to the federal government's core business. Not so the hot topic of discussion the week before that, which was how exactly Congress should pay for the estimated $6 billion annually it would cost to extend an expiring 2007 reduction in the interest rate on federally guaranteed student loans.

Both major political parties wanted to keep subsidizing the loans at 3.4 percent instead of letting the rate go backup to the pre-2007 6.8 percent. The dispute concerned whether the money would come from boosting payroll taxes on corporations (as favored by Senate Democrats), cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies (as House Democrats wanted), or cutting spending from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the House Republicans' proposal). As frequently happens with microscopic differences on minor issues, the choice was portrayed by the political class as a matter of life or death.

"This is personal" Obama told college students in Iowa. "This is at the heart of who we are. We've got to make college more affordable for more young people. We can't put the middle class at a disadvantage. We can't price out folks who are trying to make sure that they not only succeed for themselves but help the country succeed."

While there is an interesting policy debate to be had about government intervention in the increasingly expensive higher education business, a little perspective is in order: The federal leviathan currently burns through $6 billion in less than 15 hours. It...