Goldmark: Candidates duck serious issues

We've now seen the Republican primary scrambles in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the survivors have descended on South Carolina.

With the country in so much trouble, it is stunning how little serious talk there has been about the most serious issues. We're experiencing dangerous erosion on several fronts: jobs, economic solvency, viability of the middle class, global influence and confidence in our own institutions of self-government. You'd think that those running for president would tell us how they'd reverse that erosion and start moving forward again on those critical fronts. But they're not.

Look at these trends and ask yourself a) whether you are comfortable with them, and b) whether you'd like to see them reversed. I think they're a flashing red light that we're moving in the wrong direction -- but no one, including Obama, is yet putting a serious plan on the table to reverse them.

From 1980 to 2006, the share of all pretax personal income earned by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans went from 9 percent to nearly 19 percent.

Tax changes enacted by Congress reinforced rather than counteracted this trend, so that the wealthiest 1 percent over the same period went from receiving 7.7 percent to 16.3 percent of national, after-tax income.

In 1980, the average member of the wealthiest 1 percent made 12.5 times median household income; by 2006, it was 36 times.

Corporate, after-tax profits as a percentage of gross domestic product have doubled since 1980, from roughly 5 percent to 10 percent, but corporate taxes as a percentage of corporate profits have dropped from about 45 percent to 20 percent.

Personal wage and salary income -- what real people really earn -- as a percentage of GDP has fallen during the same period, from roughly 48 percent to 44 percent.

Over the past decade, our annual federal budget deficits have gone from zero to roughly $1.5 trillion, and our national debt has more than doubled to about $15 trillion. Some of that debt went to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; sizable chunks went to other defense spending and the Medicare prescription benefit. But as the trends above show, a good chunk of it went to wealthy individuals and to corporations. We ran up long-term debt our children will stagger under to reduce the tax burden on corporations, and the share of the overall financial load borne by the richest among us is lower than it has been in a long, long time. And with no discernible positive effect on the economy.

The increased wealth of corporations and the richest among us has given them disproportionate political influence, which they use to press for more tax breaks. So hats off to former Gov. Jon Huntsman for being the only candidate to propose throwing all the loopholes and gimmicks out of the tax code and claiming the extra revenue to reduce the deficit. Let's hope some of his ideas survive, even if his candidacy doesn't.

None of this history is mysterious. What is mysterious today is how a half-dozen Republican candidates campaigning for votes from some of the angriest, most worried citizens in this country can get by with slogans and claptrap rather than facing these trends and explaining what they propose to do about them.

Newt Gingrich proposes a series of tax cuts that would drive the deficit even higher. Mitt Romney says he proposes no cuts for present Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. Ron Paul says he'll slash a trillion dollars, but beyond cutting defense can't explain how. Rick Santorum's and Rick Perry's economic programs are unintelligible, to put it charitably, so I won't comment on them here.

Do these folks think we're dumb, or are they just plain afraid to talk about the tough steps we have to take? Or both of the above?

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.