It’s such a yawner of a topic that few politicians, Democrat or Republican, bring it up any more except to blame the other political party for the sluggish state of the post-9-11 economy.

People need a wake-up call. The record federal budget deficit — $455 billion this fiscal year — drags the nation’s economy and makes job creation difficult.

President Bush argues that tax breaks will rev up the economy, but so far the recovery has been in fits and starts since the recession officially began in March 2001 and officially ended by the end of that year. In fact, government figures show the economy has lost 2.7 million jobs under Bush’s watch, but new numbers produced last week show a leveling off of unemployment claims and signs that the United States is gaining on the foreign-trade gap.

We’re not getting much “trickle down” from Bush’s ambitious 10-year, $1.7 trillion-plus tax-cut proposals. But we have seen signs of a trickle-down burden — both to middle-class taxpayers and to state governments. More and more working people will be socked with a higher alternative-minimum-tax burden in later years as millionaires get to keep more of their investment riches. Meanwhile, strapped states have been forced to cut services and/or raise taxes and college tuition payments.

Bush has used the war on terrorism as an excuse for piling on more debt and growing annual budget deficits, which had been wiped out during the Clinton administration. Certainly, during war it’s not unusual to operate in the red, but there’s much more to current budget deficits than the costs of national defense and the war against terrorism. Tax cuts have taken a big bite out of the federal budget, too.

The government must borrow to pay its bills when there’s a deficit, and it is borrowing from all the wrong places, including Social Security and Medicare funds that face their own challenges down the road as more baby boomers retire.

I don’t know of any financial planner who would tell a client to borrow more and more to grow a home budget. Because we all know that the more we borrow, the more we owe in interest payments until we’re working just to pay off interest and little more. It works the same way for government, except it can print its own money at the peril of inflation.

During the 1980s, Republicans in Congress, along with moderate Democrats, kept pointing to the deficit as an economy buster. By 1993, Democrat President Bill Clinton set out to eliminate annual deficits, and a GOP Congress tried to outdo him. The economy overheated at times, and certainly the dot-com craze showed how overexuberance in investments could spiral out of control, but the government operated without a deficit for much of Clinton’s tenure, and private-sector jobs were plentiful–almost 21 million new jobs over eight years.

As more jobs were created, more working people paid taxes, producing budget surpluses to help pay off the debt quicker than planned. All of that ended with Bush’s tax cuts and the war on terror. Tax cuts without spending controls just don’t add up to prosperity.

Myriam Marquez’s e-mail address is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.