(FORTUNE Magazine) – Now that the Clinton Administration's phony budget numbers are in, and the Republicans' phony budget numbers are being prepared, the verdict is also in. Both parties are reaching the same phony conclusion: The budget deficit will wither away by 2002. It probably won't. But even if it does--even if all the sages in the White House and on Capitol Hill had the guts to tackle the tough spending cuts this year instead of three years from now, when they are going to wish they had--Washington still would have won a phony war. For all the hooting and hollering over a zero deficit, we will still have one heck of a mess on our hands.

So here's my advice. Don't get bent out of shape about this spring's budget battle. Don't get stressed out when Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio, the matinee-idol House budget chairman, charges that Clinton's budget would leave a deficit of $69 billion in 2002 instead of a surplus of $17 billion. Don't get heartburn when Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico argues that it was the economy, stupid, not the President's rectitude, that brought the deficit down from $292 billion to its current level, somewhere around $124 billion.

Because none of this stuff matters very much. Even the biggest deficit hawks privately concede that we could live nicely for a long time with a $124 billion deficit. The real crisis facing Washington isn't a numbers crisis; it's a people crisis. We have too many of them. And too many of them are old, or soon will be. Everyone thinks this crisis, like drugs and the disappearance of familiar telephone area codes, is the fault of baby-boomers, and if we can only get past them, everything will be okay again. Not true. The demographics of this country are about to change, permanently. We're headed to a new world order in which every older person will be supported by only two working people. That's a big change from today, when each retiree is supported by more than three workers.

Here's the crisis, in language even I can understand: A growing group of seniors are claiming Social Security benefits. We can probably handle that. But not when Social Security checks are combined with the health needs of older people. A few million cataracts here and a few million bad hips there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. The result is a dynamic for runaway growth or, in the sober language of the Congressional Budget Office, "debt would exceed levels that the economy could reasonably support." Ouch.

So if we declare a zero-deficit victory in 2002, we've won the battle but lost the war. The big fight isn't about this weapons system or that. It's about this middle-class benefit or that. Benefits, not battleships. Real wars, not phony ones.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief for the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.