If you want to convince yourself that Social Security and social spending is bankrupting the country, you've had a friend in Arlington (not New Hampshire) since 1992 in the Concord Coalition, founded by businessman Peter George Peterson and Pro-Biz Senators Warren Rudman (R-NH) and the late Paul Tsongas (D-MA). They were Neo-Lib before Neo-Lib was cool. (It was never, um, good.)

Don't me wrong: educating the country about the Federal Deficit is a useful endeavor, particularly among Progressives. Since we Progressives are good enough to know that the Government should spend more on things like Education, Healthcare, and infrastructure, we also need to be smart enough to know how much our Government already owes, and how much the Government can spend responsibly without needing to seek more revenue.

So if all the Concord Coalition film does is explain that the Federal Debt is nearing the critical level where it was when the CC first formed in 1992, well then--Great! Most economists now agree that the Federal Debt of the Reagan/Bush I years was a real drag on the economy in a number of ways. You could argue that the Concord Coalition helped perform a service in those years by helping convince the Clinton (I?) administration to make debt reduction a major priority, which it did, and to get the Debt down to a manageable level, which it also did.

You can view a useful historical chart of the Federal Debt here.

But just explaining the Debt and its repercussions has not always been the way with the Concord Coalition, at least not in my experience. Historically, when the CC raises the issue of the Debt, it usually switches immediately to another subject that it calls "Entitlements." Notice how when you open the Concord Coalition's web page, you get three consecutive subjects that you can "Learn" about: "The Debt"; "The Federal Deficit"; and "Entitlements".

That subjective choice of subjects carries with it a not-so-subtle political message: Debt = Federal Deficit = Entitlements. And that's at best misleading, and at worst--especially when you check the historical rise and fall of the Debt--just plain wrong.

If the Postwar story of the rise of the Federal Debt were really the story of the rise of social spending ("Entitlements"), then the Debt would have leaped up most dramatically during the last years of the 1960s. That's when L.B.J. created and funded in rapid order: Medicare; Medicaid; all of the War on Poverty programs; other major social spending projects like the old college loan programs and federal funding of the modern community college system; and even such "luxuries" as the NEA and NEH.

But that's NOT when Federal Debt leaped up. That's NOT when the Federal Debt became a problem.

No, the modern saga of the dehabilitating Federal Debt, as Princeton Economist Paul Krugman points out in The Conscience of a Liberal, is simply the story of Movement Conservatism's lethal combination of huge tax cuts for the Wealthy at the same time as--especially--unprecedented growth in military spending. This is a story that plays out throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; then the story stops and reverses during the Clinton years (I bet we'll hear about that tonight)--and then it picks up again during the Bush II years.

I'm concerned that the Concord Coalition does not invite you to "learn" about "Tax Cuts for the Rich" or "Military Spending" when you "learn" about the Debt. It's not surprising that the folks on the Board of the Concord Coalition tend to be not just Pro-Biz Neo-Libs but also hawks, like Chuck Robb and Sam Nunn.

It's hard in 2008 to imagine a modern president TRIPLING annual defense expenditures (from under $100 billion to over $300 billion), but that's exactly what Ronald Reagan did, while he was cutting the income taxes of the nation's wealthiest taxpayers in HALF. Did I mention that the enemy with whom we were engaged in a world-threatening "arms race" at that time had actually stopped increasing defense expenditures? (Thank you, de-classification of Kremlin documents.) Did I mention you should consider yourself lucky--in general--if you're too young to have dealt with national politics in the 1980s, the stupidest decade in American history since the Gilded Age?

In the 1990s, Clinton turned those practices around: he raised the top income tax rate to 40%, got defense spending under control, and thus reduced the Debt. It was not a complicated scenario. It may or may not be a related fact that Clinton then oversaw the longest economic expansion in modern history.

Then Bush II took over, cut taxes on the rich, started the Iraq War with its concomitant military spending rises, and the Debt problem has surfaced again. Again, it's not a complicated scenario; it's just simple math.

Anyway, my Dad--for 30 years an auditor for the Federal Government--used to say, and still says in one form or another: "if you want to talk about the debt, and the first thing you talk about is NOT military spending or cutting taxes on rich people, then something's wrong."

That's what I think about the CC's film. The Debt's a big deal, so if the Concord Coalition wants to talk about it, that's good.

But if the CC wants to blame that Debt on "Entitlements", that's wrong.

I'll bet that's the reason why Ron Paul's website links to the Concord Coalition's site for the film. Paul is a medical doctor who refuses to see patients who are on Medicare, and he's convinced fool on this subject if ever there was one.

If you want to see CC's film, certainly go and see it. But know CC's prejudices before you do.