If tonight's final debate between President George W. Bush and the senator John Kerry is an honest discussion of the US economy and its challenges, it will most likely be by accident. Both candidates so far have studiously avoided most of the real choices that will face the next president of the US, and focused instead on flinging insults whose simplicities and inaccuracies generally reveal as much about their originator as their subject.

On balance, Mr Kerry would probably be a better president for the economy than Mr Bush. (He could scarcely be worse.) But this judgment rests on the assumption that, like Bill Clinton, Mr Kerry in office would adopt more substantial policies than the insipid populist pabulum he has served up on the campaign trail.