I have been paying close attention to the presidential campaign and listening to what W and John Kerry consider important.

This is not to say thatÊwhat they're talking about - terrorism, economy, jobs, war, health care - isn't important.

But I think there's an issue that is more important that they're not talking about.

Frankly, it tops terrorism as my No. 1 concern. I know that terrorism is bad. I know it is important that we remain safe.

But honestly, my risk of succumbing to terrorism runs in the same range of odds as my winning the U.S. Open. Frankly, I probably have a better shot at the Open.

And I have a job and health insurance. I know lots of people don't have those things and I think it's important to help people who are truly in need.

But the one thing that really concerns me - the thing that seems most ominous to me - is the impending U.S. debt disaster.

And I can't believe politicians ignore it the way they do.

It's like they're Chicken Little in reverse. The sky is falling and they're oblivious.

I am a baby boomer. That's defined as someone born from 1946-1964. I'm a '58 model.

There are 77 million of us in the United States, give or take a few hundred thousand, and we're going to start retiring in about four years.

That's when we boomers will start leaning on Social Security and Medicare.

The economic consequences of this are completely predictable, completely obvious and, frankly, pretty darn scary.

It is virtually unfathomable to me that W or John Kerry - one of whom, by the way, will preside over this single most enormous fiscal crisis in the history of mankind - are content to ignore it.

Not only do they ignore it, they propose slathering on even more expensive stuff - job training, health care, tax cuts, more troops, more homeland security, more defense technology - the list is endless.

The U.S. budget deficit this year passed $7 trillion. OK, that's $7,000 billion. Or $7 million million. However you slice it, that's just a lot of money.

And given the current state of affairs in government, the deficit is set to add another $5 trillion to the tab in the next 10 years.

Last year, it took 18 percent of federal revenue to pay the interest on that level of debt.

Take one issue, for example. The prescription drug benefit.

Remember the partisans in Congress bickering over whether the administration hid the new prescription drug benefit's 10-year cost?

Was it $534 billion or $395 billion?

The actual government liability incurred by the new drug benefit is estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion by independent economists.

And Kerry and the Democrats call the drug benefit inadequate!

U.S. Comptroller General David Walker calls the budget outlook "chilling."

Leonard Burman, co-director of tax policy for the Urban Institute, says the long-term outlook is "just horrifying."

What all these big numbers mean is that at some point, someone is going to have to pay - huge tax increases on workers, huge cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits and huge cuts in domestic, defense and all other government programs.

And you know what?

That's the good news.

We also - unless some very immediate and drastic measures are taken - may have to endure a level of economic decline that has the potential to devastate the middle class.

There are plenty of smart people out there who are saying these things.

In a paper presented recently during the meeting of the American Economic Association, the authors point out that the United States is running very large budget and trade deficits.

Well, duh.

They note that official projections showing the deficit will decline over time aren't based on "credible assumptions."

Yeah.

And that realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers.

No argument there.

But that's pretty routine. You hear that stuff all the time.

(By the way, the authors of this paper are former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics. Those guys all know more about economics than me.)

But here's where their paper takes a turn for the worse.

"Substantial ongoing deficits may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy ...," they say.

And: "The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits."

Basically, they're saying that if we don't get this under control, investors around the world are going to lose confidence.

Princeton economist Paul Krugman says it better than I can:

"Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt, only because they believe in our political maturity - in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to rein in deficits, paying political costs if necessary. And in the past that belief has been justified. Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when the budget deficit soared."

Instead, our leaders and would-be leaders - W and Kerry - are talking about middle class tax cuts and huge, expensive new programs. They act as if there is no deficit.

Krugman:

"If this kind of fecklessness goes on, investors will eventually conclude that America has turned into a Third World country, and start to treat it like one. And the results for the U.S. economy won't be pretty."

Case in point?

Argentina, Krugman says, "Argentina retained the confidence of international investors almost to the end of the 1990s. Analysts shrugged off its large budget and trade deficits; business-friendly, free-market policies would, they insisted, allow the country to grow out of all that. But when confidence collapsed, that optimism proved foolish. Argentina, once a showpiece for the new world order, quickly became a byword for economic catastrophe."

So what do we do?

Well, there is a study by number crunchers Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Kent Smetters, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department.

The study - commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - estimated a $44 trillion fiscal gap. It laid out a few painful options on how to meet the liabilities:

• More than double the payroll tax, immediately and forever, from 15.3 percent of wages to nearly 32 percent;

• Raise income taxes by two-thirds, immediately and forever;

• Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent, immediately and forever; or eliminate forever all discretionary spending, which includes the military, homeland security, highways, courts, national parks and most of what the federal government does outside of the transfer of payments to the elderly.

That's if we act right now. The study found that waiting just until 2008, the end of the next presidency, would mean raising the payroll tax to 33. 5 percent instead of 32 percent.

I guess I can understand why politicians don't like to talk about real issues. [[In-content Ad]]