Let's blame the intellectuals...............

WRM is unimpressed with the media circus about the "fiscal cliff."  In fact, he thinks they are covering the wrong story:

Ultimately, the deficit is a consequence rather than a cause of America’s troubles; the politicians have been behaving like doctors quarreling over how to alleviate a symptom with neither group thinking clearly about curing the actual disease.

We think the critical deficits in America are policy deficits rather than fiscal deficits.   There are three big policy failures in modern America that are causing most of our pain. They are connected, and they are solvable, but so far the political system hasn’t really engaged with them, in part because America’s intellectuals as a group haven’t done the kind of creative thinking and research that could point the way forward.

As always, it is recommended to read the whole Mead essay - it can be found here.  For those who can't handle the suspense, his three policy deficits are:

The health care policy deficit. 
The ‘transition from blue’ policy deficit.
The demographic transition policy deficit.