Republicans and Democrats are fighting like old married couples over an issue that wouldn't even be on the forefront of the political agenda and would not be there if we had effective national leadership. I'm talking about the SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) battle, which wouldn't have become a battle if we'd gotten serious about another war we launched more than 40 years ago.

Believe it or not, the SCHIP battle is tied in closely to several other fights that Democrats and Republicans started long ago and have yet to resolve: the fights over ending poverty (the so-called War on Poverty) and the battle over immigration.

SCHIP, meanwhile, is set to expire today, and President Bush is threatening to veto a renewal of the program that congressional Democrats propose. Democrats want to insure not only the 6 million or so children currently in the program but add some 4 million more. Conservative Republicans claim it would insure not just needy children but children of the middle class.

Sure it's a tearjerker. No one wants to see children go without health care, no matter their families' economic status. But we as a nation must step back during this face-off to ask what we can do to prevent future generations from becoming uninsured. Let's use the SCHIP debate to have a national town hall on why we as a nation have failed to eradicate poverty more than 40 years since the War on Poverty began. If there were no poverty, the numbers of children lacking health insurance would dwindle considerably.

There are three major factors that perpetuate poverty in America.

The first is lack of education.

The second is massive legal immigration (80 percent of legal immigrants lack a high-school education) and illegal immigration (made up largely of uneducated people).

The third and much more recent factor is Bush's massive mishandling of the federal deficit. As we go deeper and deeper into debt, our dollars become less valuable, imports become much more expensive and low-income consumers get pushed to the brink of poverty.

Let's start with the third item. It must be said that the expansion of federal funding for children's health insurance is by far NOT the most costly item forcing the United States into record deficit territory.

Just this month the Treasury secretary asked once more to raise the debt ceiling (the amount the United States can borrow, mainly from abroad) beyond its current $8.96 TRILLION (with a T) level. When Bush took office, the federal debt was $5.7 trillion.

Bush's military spending and tax cuts are the demons pushing us toward financial disaster.