Here's The Deal

David Leonhardt is one of the most thoughtful and coherent economic writers of our time -- you just might not recognize his name because he doesn't write much anymore.

Here's the Deal -- a short e-book that will set you back $1.99 -- lays the federal budget bare, exposing exactly what's causing our deficits, what poses the biggest risk to future deficits, and how we might address the nation's growing debt. He doesn't yell or spout ideology. He uses numbers.

"Eventually," Leonhardt writes, "the country will have to confront the deficit we have, rather than the deficit we imagine. The one we imagine is a deficit caused by waste, fraud, abuse, foreign aid, oil-industry subsidies and vague out-of-control spending. The one we have is caused by the world's highest health costs (by far), the world's largest military (by far), a Social Security program built when most people died by age 70 -- and, to pay for it all, the lowest tax rates in decades."

[I thought everybody knew that..  Maybe, but they're not really addressing it.  OK, maybe not.]