I spotted this USA Today op-ed "On U.S. debt, it's all quiet on presidential campaign trail". It breaks almost no new policy ground whatsoever and mostly calls for somebody to do the unpleasant thing -- face the issue head-on. But it's a start! Everyone is afraid to touch this issue in spite of how critical it is.
My personal complaint about most economic politics is that every sector of society panics when their own costs rise and they get squeezed. First they deny it. Then they get mad at whoever "screwed" them. But instead of bargaining to fix the problem through economic means, those with political clout attempt to use government to preserve their "way of life". Everyone is guilty of this: government bureaucracy, regulated businesses, and labor unions.
Once enough political power blocs have fixed costs to protect, and the economy falls on hard times, the fight over the income pie turns into an arms race -- leading to strongarm legislation (minimum wage, BushCo deregulation) and inflation as more and more debt is used to stave off the inevitable.
After the bump... the comment I posted on USA Today's website.
At least with tax-and-spend you are being honest about how much money you are wasting. Borrow-and-spend causes inflation when the excess debt becomes a significant chunk of the total money supply -- something which would be much easier to monitor if the Fed had not stopped reporting M3 a little over a year ago, shortly after it passed 10 Trillion.
The Fed is managing our money supply in a textbook Keynesian manner, which is strange because I thought Keynes was discredited by the supposed success of Reaganomics in the 1980's. Now of course we know that Reagan just ran up the debt and folded social security into the general budget to hide it.
Austrian economists like Hazlitt have completely demolished Keynesian theories, yet we remain addicted to inflation. No sector of society will voluntarily downsize or lower prices to relieve the cost burden they represent to everyone else. No one has faith that after the dust settles, prices will drop more than wages and most people will have more purchasing power than before.
Too many people have fixed costs like mortgages, property taxes, contractual payments, and other loans, none of which would correct downwards in a deflationary recession -- the only way to put value back into the dollar and remove the profitability of melting down pennies (something which was recently made illegal for this very reason).
Our economy is in an arms-buildup of rising prices and costs, greatly exacerbated by our obscene debt levels and our dependence on imports. If we do not all work together to stop it, the endgame looks like Argentina, Zimbabwe, Post-WW1 Germany, etc.