It is sometimes hard to get news about the economy over in the middle of New York City. Communications ain’t what they used to be. That is what readers might conclude from reading David Leonhardt’s piece telling us that our big problem is that the United States and governments in Europe have promised too much to their populations.

The problem is that leaders of both parties have both pledged an unshakable commitment to, in the near future, make our deficit projections dramatically worse by extending all or most of the Bush tax cuts.

Ho-hum. Another day, another set of Peterson patsies explaining yet again why Grandma must starve so that their billionaire bosses and their buddies can keep their twenty-odd homes in the Hamptons and Hobe Sound.

The main cause of our long-term deficit is our absurdly inefficient health care system that costs nearly twice as much as anywhere else in the world. If politicians honestly looked for a simple solution to this problem, within five minutes they would find out almost every other industrialized nation on Earth has it.

The Bowles-Simpson plan isn’t a fair and equitable way to reduce the long-term federal deficit, whatever its co-authors might claim. In fact, it’s the biggest proposed experiment in supply-side economics since early Reagan.

I was on a conference call with White House budget director Peter Orszag and Office of Health Reform chief Nancy-Ann DeParle today, and both of them were adamant that the health care reform moving through Congress would cut costs over the long term and “move us into the future of health care,” as Orszag put it.