Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote an interesting article in yesterday’s Post wherein he sharply criticizes his colleagues for hyper-partisanship, urging the R’s to “focus on results,” and seek “solutions to the real problems of real people.” (Given Luntz’s record, one could be forgiven for thinking that he’s criticizing his constituents for listening to him, but that’s another matter).

As Luntz recognizes, and you have to be pretty checked out not to, there are lots of real problems out there. I know, the Third-Way folks, for their own cryptic reasons, are trying to spin away from this reality, but that facts speak for themselves, as do the midterm-election outcomes, which Luntz compellingly cites.

Of course, the war is a major motivator behind the anxiety he describes (only 34 percent of the electorate believe that “the America of tomorrow will be better than the America of today”), but talk to any politician who’s been out on the stump—hell, talk to your neighbors—and you hear the personal versions of the statistical portraits we try to paint here at the Economic Policy Institute.

These include deep concerns about access to and ability to afford health care, stagnant incomes for many working families while growth skews increasingly to the top, government fecklessness ranging from incompetent agencies to continued gridlock (e.g., a minimum wage bill that’s hung-up on a tax cut argument), job loss and globalization.

Pols to whom I’ve spoken stress this last one, talking about people who have pressed them on what they plan to do to address the loss of upper middle-class jobs in manufacturing along with downward pressure on white collar wages.

If you’re running for national office, you need an answer for the autoworker who lost his union job along with his foothold in the middle class. You need an answer for college-educated workers whose real wages are up less than two percent since 2000, and another one for the working poor person who has struggled through the first recovery on record where poverty went up for the first three years.

And you can’t get away with, “get more education.” That won’t cut it with either aging, blue-collar boomers or folks who already have lots of formal schooling. Sure, most Americans recognize how important skills are today, but thankfully, they’re not nearly so quick to blame themselves for trends beyond their control.

Luntz gets that these are great national concerns, requiring a response. What he doesn’t get is that you can’t solve these problems without spending some money. To the contrary, he thinks you can “solve real problems” while supporting a balanced-budget amendment and pledging to a “clause making it difficult to raise taxes.”

It’s a problem that will bedevil all the Republican ’08 candidates, and anyone else for that matter, who wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, attack the deficit, and balance the budget, all while pledging never to raise taxes. Do they really believe they can address health care, globalization, unprecedented inequalities by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, promoting marriage, telling people to get smarter, and whatever other costless ideas they can dream up?

This doesn’t mean candidates need to go to the Mondale place and pledge to raise taxes. But it does mean they, and we, have to start building support for the idea that it will take some resources to meet challenges of the magnitude we face, much in the spirit that Mark Schmitt wisely argues here.

It’s ironic that Luntz should point the way forward—less so that he doesn’t know how to get there. Let us be sure that the same is not said of those of us who recognize the need to get the government out of the business of creating problems, and back in the business of solving them.