I read the news everyday, including the <b>New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, alternet, truthout, commondreams, the New York Review of Books, the Boston Review, the Huffington Post</b> and others. I have yet to see a review of the US budget or what the candidates proposals would mean to the US budget.

To be blunt, the budget, is where most of the policy is decided. A question to Barack and Hillary should be, "How much money do you plan to budget to bring the troops home the first year in office?" I don't know is not an answer!

The questions on health care should be similar, "How are your health care plans going to affect the budget?" What savings will they bring and to whom? Who will pay for the increases in cost?

Unfortunately people will talk around the edges of difficult issues; and both candidates prefer to attack each other than talk about the substance.

Many people talk about how Walter Mondale lost the election. Sadly he lost the election on the myth that the Reagan revolution would pay down the debt. No one, until Bill Clinton took office wanted to talk about raising taxes. The closest we got was Ross Perot saying he would open up the hood. After Clinton got a tax increase through congress, democrats promptly lost congress.

The trouble is we are not collecting enough taxes today due to Reagan/BushI/BushII tax cuts. There may not be enough money in Social Security not because the Social Security taxes are not high enough; but rather because Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II; spent the entire trust fund and increased the national debt tremendously. Yet no one bothers to talk about this ridiculousness. Instead people worry about taxes for people who make between 100 and 250 thousand dollars; and whether or not capital gains should be so far below normal taxes that hedge fund managers pay less taxes than their secretaries. Yet when asked about this neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can say yes capital gains should be on the same scale as income taxes.

So where does this leave us. We are left in a sound bite (a few minutes or less) world, where candidates refuse to discuss substance, commentators refuse to ask about substance, and few (very few) can really explain substance. We all would rather watch Survivor than understand.

Now wonder George and Charlie didn't ask anything worth while.