Is anybody taking this presidential election seriously? I mean anybody? Because the candidates certainly do not seem inclined to do so.

A generation ago (yes, it’s been that long) James Carville, strategist for the Clinton campaign, famously framed the 1992 presidential race with his quip “it’s the economy, stupid”, a phrase subsequently employed as a guiding mantra for the campaign. It was brilliant as a campaign strategy, if inaccurate — other things clearly matter in a presidential race, or should; a dangerous and increasingly unstable world full of current and potential adversaries with nuclear weapons and a bad attitude, for instance — but Carville’s point was the economy is the issue that most animates voters.

Last Monday, the U.S. Department of Treasury informed us as of July the U.S. government was operating on a deficit of $1.52 trillion. By the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, they estimate that hole to be on the order of $1.87 trillion. That is how much money the federal government is spending that it doesn’t have. That sort of thing used to be called irresponsible, back when such sums were unthinkable.

Earlier in the month those who care to pay attention to such things woke to the news the country had “unexpectedly” surpassed $35 trillion in debt. Did you miss the news? Entirely understandable. The country appears to have become desensitized to such figures. After all, we hit and surpass new national debt numbers with disturbing regularity.

Of course, it could be the sheer scope of such a number is simply too much for most of us to process. $35 trillion? How does one fathom that? A single trillion is a thousand billion. I need to write out a list if I’m picking up more than about 10 things at the store. A thousand billion? And then one-and-a-half- of those? Or 35 of them? What? To hell with it, I’m pulling up HBO.

But those are the figures we are dealing with. Spending more than $1.5 trillion we don’t have, adding to a $35 trillion debt, which was $32 trillion about a year ago, and which will reach a new, freshly inconceivable milestone in a few months.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

And not a word from either presidential candidate, who will inherit the fiduciary responsibility for those numbers.

Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, isn’t saying much at all, to anyone, about policy, hoping no one will notice. Meanwhile, Former President Donald Trump is more concerned about her crowd sizes and other such nonsense.

This ought to be something of a boon for Trump. After all, these gargantuan debt and deficit figures are accumulating under the watch of President Joe Biden, with Harris as vice president, and presumably campaigning under that record. Biden has spent the country’s money at an absurd level, and has sustained 9.1% year-over-year inflation — a universal tax — to show for it. Harris, to the extent she has unveiled anything resembling policy positions at all, has promised to keep the motor hurtling toward the cliff, with promises of “affordable health care, affordable child care and paid family leave,”. Meaning, of course paid for by someone else. 

Mind you, part of the reason Trump may be avoiding the debt issue is he doesn’t seem to care any more about it than Harris. The GOP, at least in the Trump iteration, seems to have blithely accepted Keynesian myths as readily as Eisenhower did the excesses of FDR’s New Deal. He may not have spent as much as Biden while he was in office, but he tried his best. And he has sounded every bit as economic populist as Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in his insistence against even acknowledging the approaching train wreck of entitlements, let alone do anything about it.

Of $5.6 trillion in government spending, $1.87 trillion of which it doesn’t have, $1.21 trillion is going to social security and $721 billion is going to Medicare. Not to mention $763 billion in interest. To mount our nation’s defense in a dangerous, unstable world? A shade over $700 billion. Yet far be it for anyone to dare recommend social security be reformed to do what it’s supposed to: repay retired American’s what the government took from them in social security tax, plus interest, and offer emergency insurance against destitution.    

That would be the morally correct, but politically suicidal, approach. We seem to have lost any remaining shred of moral pause at the thought of spending what we don’t have, and shunting that debt on to our progeny. Facing that economic truth, dire as it is, and prescribing the proper remedies would be responsible thing for a presidential candidate to do, but that would require responsible presidential candidates.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.