Published: June 10, 2007
As I drove to work the other morning, the guys on the local sports talk radio
station stopped discussing the ills of the Devil Rays to give listeners some
breaking news.
I wondered, did Florida basketball coach Billy Donovan change his mind - again? Did Yankees manager Joe Torre get fired?
No, the breaking news was Paris Hilton getting released early from her jail sentence!
If that wasn't enough, when I got to work every cable station on every TV in the newsroom was covering the story, complete with legal analysts and celebrity commentators.
A Growing 'I Don't Care' List
Even though I consider myself a news junkie, I quickly tuned out this latest bit of "news" about the spoiled rich girl. Paris Hilton is just one of many people and issues I could not care less about.
Not only do I not care about Paris Hilton, I don't care who the father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter is or who gets the money she might inherit. I don't care that Lindsay Lohan is in rehab or that Alec Baldwin said some nasty things to his daughter or that David Hasselhoff's daughters videotaped him in a drunken stupor or that Britney Spears forgets (maybe) to put on underwear. I also don't care who won "American Idol" and may be the only person in the country who doesn't watch it.
(I do wonder, however, why these rich, drugged-up, drunken celebrities are too stupid to pay someone to drive them around instead of getting busted for DUI all the time.)
What we all should really be concerned about was made clear by a group who visited the Tribune editorial board a few weeks ago on a "fiscal wake-up tour." The news they dispensed wasn't good and won't allow us to engage in the escapism of a Paris Hilton story, but it should be a major concern to all Americans.
A Fiscal Time Bomb
The group included David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Robert Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, and members of the conservative Heritage Foundation and liberal Brookings Institution. They were all united by arithmetic, not ideology.
The figures they presented were scary. Currently Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid take up 40 percent of the federal budget, and it will only get worse when we baby boomers start retiring next year. We can either do nothing about this fiscal time bomb - which seems to be the preferred choice at the moment - raise taxes or eliminate all other federal spending.
"People are starved for the truth and leadership," said one member of the group.
I'm not so sure. Our increasing inability to focus on anything for more than 30 seconds makes me wonder if we're really ready to tackle our current fiscal policy, which is unsustainable. Americans seem to suffer from attention deficit disorder when it comes to the hard choices the nation will have to make.
According to The Concord Coalition, "Elected leaders in Washington know there is a problem, but they are unlikely to act unless their constituents - We The People - demand it."
In the meantime, we'll always have Paris.
Joseph H. Brown is a Tribune editorial writer.