National Review’s Jim Geraghty:

If indeed, this election turns on whether the American people are willing to hear hard truths they don’t want to hear, it may be worth asking how our society reached the point where so many people are so resistant to hearing these sorts of hard truths: You can’t spend more than you have. There aren’t many substitutes for working hard. You can’t rely on someone else to improve the quality of your life — particularly not the government. Government cannot be Santa Claus. There is no free lunch.

When we look at the current worsening problems of our country, what’s particularly infuriating is how predictable they were, and how many folks have been sounding the alarms, only to have most of our leaders, inside and outside of government, ignore those warnings. Throughout the 1990s, the threat of al-Qaeda metastasized and grew; our government responded by launching cruise missiles at tents. Our growth in the past decade was fueled by an unsustainable housing bubble, predictable to anyone buying a house and seeing the tax assessment increase by $100,000 per year. Way too many of our schools stink, and we’ve been only half-responsive since A Nation at Risk, a 1983 presidential report that “warned that the education system was ‘being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.’” Children from broken homes can grow into happy, productive, well-adjusted adults — but the odds are much tougher. A popular culture that celebrates materialism, instant gratification, self-absorption, and so on will sow the seeds for disappointment and frustration and displaced rage. If children grow up believing that rock stars, movie stars, and professional athletes are the most celebrated and glamorous roles in society, you will get many competing to play those roles — and fewer aspiring doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors.

Now we face the “fiscal cliff,” a downgraded national credit rating, and more economic dark clouds on the horizon. The Tea Party was in large part an echo of the H. Ross Perot candidacy of 1992, worrying about runaway deficit spending and debt. Back then the national debt was $4 trillion. Now it’s $15.9 trillion; about $5.2 trillion has been added since January 20, 2009. …

Today’s political debates often include an element of elitism vs. populism: Do you trust the government or individuals? While many of us on the right yearn for a society with as much individual freedom and individual responsibility as possible, after witnessing enough mass stupidity, some Americans yearn for government to save people from the consequences of their own decisions. The Nanny State instinct is driven by all of our fellow citizens who demonstrate awful judgment. We’re not capable of knowing whether we can afford a house. We’re not capable of obtaining our own contraception. If you don’t take care of your health, the mayor of New York wants to take away your large sodas.

In political debates about “elitism,” someone will often ask whether you want an “elite” brain surgeon or whether you want an “everyman,” and someone else will respond that making good decisions in government is, quite literally, not brain surgery. …

Looking at our decades of failing to act on runaway entitlements, the growing debt, an ever-more complicated tax code, and failing schools, it is easy to conclude that the argument in favor of “elitism” would be stronger if our current crop of elites did a better job in their perches.

The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer makes two cases for voting against Barack Obama (and his supporters — see Baldwin, Tammy, Pocan, Mark, et al):

The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt.

The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you — you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly — but to government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.

Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing philosophy you want for this nation?

Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however, is stewardship. Are you better off today than you were $5 trillion ago? Look at the wreckage around you. This presidency is a failure. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to fix things. Elect me, etc. etc.

Easy peasy, but highly risky. If you run against Obama’s performance in contrast to your own competence, you stake your case on persona. Is that how you want to compete against an opponent who is not just more likable and immeasurably cooler but spending millions to paint you as an unfeeling, out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity plutocrat?

The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also explanatory. It underpins the stewardship argument. Obama’s ideology — and the program that followed — explains the failure of these four years. …

First, the $831 billion stimulus that was going to “reinvest” in America and bring unemployment below 6 percent. We know about the unemployment. And the investment? Obama loves to cite great federal projects such as the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system. Fine. Name one thing of any note created by Obama’s Niagara of borrowed money. A modernized electric grid? Ports dredged to receive the larger ships soon to traverse a widened Panama Canal? Nothing of the sort. Solyndra, anyone?

Second, radical reform of health care that would reduce its ruinously accelerating cost: “Put simply,” he said, “our health-care problem isour deficit problem” — a financial hemorrhage drowning us in debt.

Except that Obamacare adds to spending. The Congressional Budget Office reports that Obamacare will incur $1.68 trillion of new expenditures in its first decade. To say nothing of the price of the uncertainty introduced by an impossibly complex remaking of one-sixth of the economy — discouraging hiring and expansion as trillions of investable private-sector dollars remain sidelined.

The third part of Obama’s promised transformation was energy. His cap-and-trade federal takeover was rejected by his own Democratic Senate. So the war on fossil fuels has been conducted unilaterally by bureaucratic fiat. Regulations that will kill coal. A no-brainer pipeline (Keystone) rejected lest Canadian oil sands be burned. (China will burn them instead.) A drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that a federal judge severely criticized as illegal. …

Ideas matter. The 2010 election, the most ideological since 1980, saw the voters resoundingly reject a Democratic Party that was relentlessly expanding the power, spending, scope and reach of government.

It’s worse now. Those who have struggled to create a family business, a corner restaurant, a medical practice won’t take kindly to being told that their success is a result of government-built roads and bridges.

I don’t think it’s a choice between the two, because while ideology has wrought the disaster this country is now in, there is still this detail:

Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff and columnist Scott Burns, authors of The Clash of Generations (as reported by Bloomberg):

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.

In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap — the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness — rose by $11 trillion.

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones. …

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using the Congressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands. …

When fully retired, 78 million baby boomers will collect, on average, more than 85 percent of per-capita gross domestic product ($40,000 in today’s dollars) in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Each passing year brings these outlays one year closer, which raises their present value. …

The answer for the U.S. isn’t pretty. Closing the gap using taxes requires an immediate and permanent 64 percent increase in all federal taxes. Alternatively, the U.S. needs to cut, immediately and permanently, all federal purchases and transfer payments, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, by 40 percent. Or it can mix these terrible fiscal medicines with honey, namely radical fiscal reforms that make the economy much fairer and far stronger. What the government can’t do is pay its bills by spending more and taxing less. America’s children, whose futures are being rapidly destroyed, are smart enough to tell us this.

Two thoughts: (1) Perhaps the winners Nov. 6 will be the real losers. (2) Don’t bother making retirement plans. You won’t be able to.