ten-year projected deficit freakin' enormous

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama's budget would increase the U.S. deficit in 2011 to 2020 by $1.2 trillion more than the White House has forecast, the Congressional Budget Office said on Friday.

The CBO report fueled immediate criticism from Republicans who said Obama was raising government debt to "alarming" levels.

"Measured relative to the size of the economy, the deficit under the President's proposals would fall to about 4 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by 2014 but would rise steadily thereafter," the CBO said in a preliminary analysis.

What the Reuters story fails to observe, though, is that the projected deficit is expected to be $9.8 trillion. Trill-ee-yun.

Let me write it out numerically: $9,800,000,000,000. For the next ten years.

You know how you get a credit card balance every month? It could be in the thousands of dollars, but the minimum you have to pay each month is like $20 or something? Imagine that a person pays that minimum amount each month and piles on thousands in charges -- i.e. money he does not have -- every single month. Think of what that does to his financial wellbeing, and multiply that times a nation. Now multiply that by a couple of generations. That's what we're looking at. The United States of America is paying the minimum and piling up billions, even trillions, in charges every year.

So naturally the folks in Washington are looking for ways to pay for it. The first easy avenue is always to stick their hands further into the pockets of Americans.

And the Associated Press says:

The report says that extending tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 under GOP President George W. Bush and continuing to update the alternative minimum tax so that it won't hit millions of middle-class taxpayers would cost $3 trillion over 2011-2020. The tax cuts expire at the end of this year and Obama wants to extend them -- except for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making $250,000.

Now let's get something straight, here. Cutting taxes doesn't cost the government anything. That would imply the government has an inherent claim to the money that it has less of as a result of the tax cuts.

It does not. The people do.

Raising taxes costs Americans. Refusing to extend the Bush tax cuts means raising taxes on Americans.

Let's assume that the folks in Washington really would update the alternative minimum tax so that it won't hit millions of middle-class taxpayers. Why is it better for that $3 trillion to be in the hands of federal bureaucrats than for it to be in the hands of business owners who are in a position to hire people who are now looking for work? This is what infuriates people about the prevailing philosophy in Washington. The philosophy is that whatever problems society faces can be "solved" in Washington. So let's all make sure Washington has the resources to fix it by patriotically ponying up more and more of our hard-earned cash.

How little faith does one have to have in private sector citizens, how cynical does one have to be about hardworking Americans to subscribe to such a vision? Does anyone really believe all that money will be spent any more frugally or wisely by government cronies who don't know how to spend money they don't even have?

Spending the country into multiple generations of enormous debt will not cost the government. It will cost the original earners of the money the government taxes and then spends like there's no tomorrow.