Steve, I don't disagree that the Clinton administrations cut back on military and national security expenditures. Those cutbacks, along with some less than stellar top management in the security agencies, and to a lesser degree the military, had bad results. I'm not sure our awful foreign intelligence was the result of cost reductions or simply bad management. The inadequate equipping of the military prior to the invasion of Iraq was clearly the result of both spending cuts and bad management.

But spending $10 billion more than we took in in just eight years was the result of a whole lot more than just catching up on spending for national security and funding the war in Iraq. I could do a lot of research on government spending since we last had a surplus, but my guess is that increases in national security and military funding wouldn't amount to even 10% of the deficit.

I remain of the strong belief that without the spending discipline of rules like PayGo, the Congress went wild--like pigs at the trough, as John McCain describes them--spending, making politically expedient decisions to cut taxes several times, and creating a fiscal problem that will likely take several generations of Americans to resolve. Sure, the Republicans can be blamed for the first six years, but the Democrats have done little to correct the fiscal imbalance in the two years since they had some control. To me, they're all complicit, all the while being "egged on" by an increasing number of special interest lobbyists.

As John McCain says in his campaign ads, "Our government is broke." The question facing all of us is who will be more likely and more politically able to begin to fix our fiscal problems? Remember, "wanting to" and "being able to" are two different things the way our democracy works. Both factors have to be taken into consideration when deciding which candidate is more likely to create real change in our government.