Nobody says this out loud for fear of scaring the children, but have you taken a look at the national debt lately?

We're nearing $9.4 trillion and will be there before this newspaper yellows. We've had a reliable increase of roughly a half-trillion dollars a year under President Bush, but it looks as if he may leave office without quite doubling our debt. Sometimes you just run out of time.

The question today, class, is which presidential candidate is most capable of keeping us living well beyond our means?

Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, plans to stick with the administration plan: Continue fighting the Iraq War; don't bother paying for it.

The Democratic candidates both say they'll wind down the war, pushing Iraqis to figure out Iraq for themselves, but it's not as if either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton plans to stop spending. Each favors greatly expanding health care. That won't be cheap.

As Americans, we've been taught to expect something for nothing, so nobody is asking any candidate to get real. But as long as we're going to stick our children and grandchildren with a tab north of $10 trillion, we should at least check the historical record. In our Internet age, daily updates are easily available at www.treasurydirect.gov.

You can also find the debt reading for each year going back to George Washington's presidency, but we'll concentrate on recent history. Because even a cursory study shows that one reason the neoconservative movement may be more popularly known as "neocon" is because "neo" means "new" and "con" means "swindle."

Let's start with that old liberal, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president upon John F. Kennedy's death in November 1963. With the social programs of the Great Society and the Vietnam War, one would expect the Johnson administration to have run up quite the bill.

Yet Johnson was relatively frugal. The record shows that in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1963, the federal debt was $317 billion. On the same date six years later, with Johnson six months out of office, the debt had jumped to nearly $354 billion.

Even so, we're still looking at less than a 12 percent increase in six years. Given that inflation was nearly 20 percent in the same period, you could argue that the debt shrank.

The debt continued to rise through the 12 years of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, but shrank as a percentage of the overall economy. Then came the man with the national credit card, Ronald Reagan, who inherited a debt of less than a trillion dollars and nearly tripled it in eight years.

His successor, George Bush the Elder, tried to stem the flood of red ink and America tossed him from office for raising taxes. By the time Bill Clinton took office in 1993, after 12 years of Republicans in the White House, America's debt had more than quadrupled and was no longer shrinking as a percentage of gross domestic product.

President Clinton took a harder line on the budget but debt still grew by nearly 40 percent, from $4.1 trillion to nearly $5.7 trillion, in his eight years. Still, when he left the White House, the phrase "balanced federal budget" was no longer political mythology.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Afghanistan. Then President Bush successfully pushed for war in Iraq. The wisdom of that can be debated elsewhere, but the cold hard numbers show that a debt south of $5.7 trillion less than eight years ago is now tickling $9.4 trillion.

There are those who say none of this can be pinned on a particular president because Congress theoretically has charge of the federal purse. But presidents lead, and the presidents often had a compliant Congress yet didn't submit balanced budgets. There is a certain hilarity in the Republican reputation for fiscal conservatism. The reality is borrow-and-spend.

But this can't be pinned on one party. No presidential candidate is pushing too hard for fiscal restraint because America prefers not to think about the missing trillions. We want what we want and we don't want to pay for it.

So the national debt works out to nearly $31,000 per person. That includes every last kid you'll find at Chuck E. Cheese. Let them pay for it someday. If any of them ask why, tell 'em they never should have figured that all the chauffeuring we did for them was going to be free.