The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far.  The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class.  The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.

The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should.  When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring.  You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem.  You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.

The facts are plain and simple:  A growing elderly population with soaring health-care costs hardly can be supported by a growing HispanicLatino population whose households are worth18 times less than white, non-HispanicLatino households.  And when health-care costs burn from both sides of the life spectrum, the fate of any country is not difficult to discern.  The worth of the average HispanicLatino household and a shrinking middle class do not generate enough of a financial stream with which to put out the fiscal fire already burning.

The incessant drumbeat of how important the HispanicLatino population is to the country might be altering long-held views on immigration.  Most of the nation now wants pathways to citizenship for the millions of workers in the country illegally.  It is not hard, for older Americans especially who hear the message, to understand that more tax-paying workers are necessary to support their future.  There is, however, a part of the population that will never understand the equation.  It lives in delusion in a world that no longer exists.  And these individuals, of course, are unable to comprehend that unless the country undertakes to rebuild itself – through directed investment in health care for the young to nip the obesity problem now, through targted investment in education and through verifiable research and development to solve the problems of extracting and using natural gas to transform the economy – nothing done in Washington on taxes and spending now will mean much later.

Washington these days has the feel of pettiness when these should be days for optimism.  The electorate turned back a right-wing philosophy that would have ensured the country an inglorious fate – except that a small band of Republicans continues to look at the nation in a different light than what it is:  Blessed with a new and more youthful population and a new source of energy that can remake the country and re-engineer its economy to create a new and vibrant middle class.  The opportunity the country has before it is an opportunity that cannot be diminished by paltry political fights.  Before creating a second American century for itself and for the benefit of humankind, the country needs to look beyond the small to the great.

Republicans talk about smaller government not realizing that in talking about it they make themselves look smaller still than they did the night of the election a month ago. The election blew apart their perception of reality and confirmed Americans’ belief that government can coexist with free enterprise.  The election was, after all, about the economy.  History could record the results as a departure point to another sustained period of American greatness.

Republicans look smaller not recognizing the greater promise ahead.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.