In a July survey by the Pew Research Center asking the public to name the most important problems facing the country, the war in Iraq came in at the top, followed by the economy in general. The growing federal budget deficit didn't even make the top 10.

	This is one in an occasional series of articles leading up to November's election about economic issues being put forth by President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry.

"Have you heard either of the candidates mention the deficit in the debates?" asked one frustrated economist, after the first two face-offs between President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry. The shortfall got a bit more airtime in the final debate, but it hasn't held the public's attention in the way it did in the 1992 election.

Less than a decade after a combination of economic luck, hard-won spending controls and the somehow galvanizing charts of alternative presidential candidate Ross Perot helped push the U.S. budget back into the black, red ink is oozing out of Washington, D.C., again.

Each of the two major party presidential candidates this year has promised to cut the record $413 billion deficit in half by 2009, but economists worry neither candidate is really addressing the long-term problems bearing down on the nation's wallet.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, projects deficits for the fiscal year just ended through 2010 will total an accumulated $2.3 trillion. The accompanying pile of national debt will grow to $6.3 trillion, putting the annual interest payment on debt alone to $579 billion, more than the CBO projects the government will spend on defense that year.

Even voters who worry about running up credit cards would likely find it difficult to crunch the campaign numbers being tossed around. The bipartisan Concord Coalition's most recent calculations show Kerry's major proposals adding $1.269 trillion to the deficit through 2014, while Bush's major ideas would add $1.326 trillion.

The coalition noted the campaigns themselves contested many of the cost estimates being used. But then, there are so many ways to run the numbers.

	Graphic: U.S. budget deficits

For example, the coalition estimates Kerry's health care plans, which include programs to extend coverage of uninsured children and create health insurance pools for small businesses, could cost $653 billion over 10 years. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-oriented public policy think tank, projected the cost at $1.3 trillion.

The coalition's Bush totals do not include the cost of the president's proposal to allow workers to invest a portion of Social Security payroll taxes in personal accounts.

No matter its long-term impact -- good or ill -- the change would increase the deficit, in part by requiring a massive outlay to cover the cost of potential Social Security payroll taxes being diverted into the private accounts and in part by reducing a Social Security surplus that the government now uses to finance operations and thus keep the deficit from growing more.

The price tag on the war in Iraq is yet another unknown.

Bush also wants more tax cuts, while Kerry would add some for the middle class and repeal those given recently to families making more than $200,000, using that money to fund things such as the new health care coverage.

Both men advocate some form of the pay-as-you-go policies of the 1990s that required lawmakers to fund new spending with cuts of the same magnitude. But Bush would not, as his father did when pay-as-you-go rules were in place, use tax increases to offset spending increases.

The deficit debate is not only exhausting to slog through, it is annoying. This problem was supposed to have gone away.

In a 1997 paper as the government headed toward surpluses, University of California economics professor J. Bradford DeLong proclaimed, "It marks the end of the era in which large budget deficits did substantial harm to American economic growth."

Deficits returned over the past three years as the stock market bubble burst, the economy moved into recession, spending on defense and homeland security accelerated, and record tax cuts were approved to try and perk up the economy again.

Short-term deficits are not always a bad thing. Strategic tax cuts can help boost the economy, said Robert Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, founded in 1992 to push the cause of fiscal responsibility. It is the long-term costs of financing that debt that begin to be a problem.

Two Brookings Institution fellows estimated that the deteriorating budget outlook would, by 2012, raise interest rates and reduce annual national income by more than $2,900 per household.

It's not just the candidates' projections that economists question.

The CBO's calculations assume a steady increase in income from the alternative minimum tax that was created years ago to make sure the wealthy don't escape taxes through too many loopholes. The tax was not indexed to inflation and is affecting more people than originally intended, something Congress will likely have to fix at the expense of tax revenue figured into the CBO projections.

Neither candidate has spent a lot of time addressing the bigger bills that will start coming due in the not-too-distant future. "We've got this tidal wave sitting right there about to crash onto the budget," said Bixby.

The massive baby boom generation is heading right toward expensive entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. But the full impact of those costs won't hit hard for at least a decade if not longer, reducing the incentive for candidates trying to win an election nearly two weeks away to discuss such unpleasantries as tax increases or spending cuts.

Morgan Stanley economist Richard Berner sees no choice but to make the hard choices to trim the deficits in the short term and to consider more radical policy changes to cope with the big expenses coming in the long term.

But he believes that it may take another crisis to get politicians off the dime. "I suspect that higher interest rates -- perhaps significantly higher rates -- will be the needed trigger for making significant changes to our fiscal policy."