With the early presidential campaigning ramping up, it’s time to start paying attention to the frontrunners and seeing what our future might hold. John Edwards gave us a nice, candid look at what America would look like under his watch. I’ll tell you that it doesn’t make me happy, but at least it’s more honest than the faux populism he plays at while building the kind of estate that the left would complain about loudly if it were being built by a Republican politician. Talk about conspicuous consumption.

Anyhow, Edwards promises us bigger government, higher taxes, and more bureaucracy --although not in so many words. Reading between the lines doesn’t take a super-secret decoder ring, though; it just takes a little knowledge of how government goes even with people who pay lip service to “limited” government ideals.

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday said that he would raise taxes, chiefly on the wealthy, to pay for expanded healthcare coverage under a plan costing $90 billion to $120 billion a year to be unveiled on Monday.

“We’ll have to raise taxes. The only way you can pay for a healthcare plan that cost anywhere from $90 to $120 billion is there has to be a revenue source,” Edwards said on NBC’s Meet the Press news program.

The 2004 vice presidential nominee and former North Carolina senator said his plan would “get rid of George Bush’s tax cuts for people who make over $200,000 a year.”

He said the plan would also reduce healthcare costs.

A series of thoughts:

What would most of us pay to have a leader who said something closer to this:

Folks, I’m pretty comfortable with our level of taxation. The Federal government takes a lot of money from you all--and it shouldn’t need to take any more. What we need to do is prioritize the spending, find a way to live within a budget like any other responsible organization, and spend the money more efficiently.

So, I’m not going to promise you a lot of new programs or new spending. I’m going to find a way to make Social Security make sense--to be self-funding and to provide something of value to the people who pay the bill. The system we have now promises to be part of what bankrupts our country and leaves our grandchildren with a mess that could well destroy our nation and will certainly diminish our political and economic power around the world.

What we don’t need is money being taken out of the market; what we need is more responsible government.

See, that’s the person I want in the office.

What Edwards promises, though, is to take more of our money and spend it on something that he naively believes will lower our national health care bill. When has any government handout program cost less than the estimate? The apparent cost to some end-users might be less, but the cost will be higher and will probably result in even greater budget deficits.

But the only people who will pay more will be the rich ones. Which is, apparently, anyone who makes more than $200,000 a year--a number that is far more than I make in a year, but certainly doesn’t qualify as wealthy.

None of which explains how the Colts let the Bears score a touchdown on the opening kickoff of the Super Bowl.

Talk about digging a hole early.