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After more than 200 years of success, American constitutional government is broken. Our economy has serious faults and will never be healthy until we mend our government. We must restore the effective functioning it had over its first two centuries.

But tragically, the brokenness of our government stems from the disarray and brokenness of our politics. These continue to head in the wrong direction. We are entering the most intense phase of presidential campaigning and yet there is little mention by either major candidate of the two most vital economic challenges we face: First, federal finances, which have not been on a sustainable footing for 23 years, are approaching a death spiral.



Second, the largest component of our budget, the FICA-funded programs of Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OAS&DI) and Medicare, each are specifically unsustainable. These problems of funding our major social insurance programs and of medium- and long-term balancing of federal finances as a whole, are not insoluble ones. Indeed, the experience of the 1990s — when responsibility in the general budget created confidence in households, businesses and financial markets and thus prosperity — should tell us that similar actions today can have near-immediate positive effects.

But that would require renunciation of the factionalism that has come to dominate our politics. It would require the re-establishment of bipartisan cooperation in the drafting and passage of legislation in Congress,.

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