The Congressional Budget Office released new budget estimates yesterday, and the news is not good. Adjusting its "baseline" to actual spending and revenue trends, CBO said the federal budget deficit would grow to a new world-record $480 billion next year. Worse yet, the number-crunchers estimated that cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years would reach $1.4 trillion (and that's before adjusting for gimmicks in the current tax code). Recall that CBO was estimating 10-year budget surpluses of more than five-and-a-half trillion dollars when George W. Bush took office, and you get an idea of the breathtaking deterioration of the country's fiscal condition in less than three years.

The Bush administration reacted to this very bad news in its accustomed What-Me-Worry fashion, suggesting that the economic growth that's just around the corner will wipe out deficits, and that after all, no one estimated the budget surpluses of the 1990s 10 years out.

These responses are, to use the online abbreviation, LOL (laughing out loud) hilarious. The CBO estimates already assume a big, booming economic recovery beginning next year and continuing throughout the rest of the decade -- hardly a lead pipe cinch, especially if public borrowing continues to spike ever upwards. Furthermore, the surpluses of the 1990s did not magically appear due to some fortuitous economic growth. There was, ahem, that big deficit reduction package forced through Congress by the Clinton administration in 1993 without a single Republican vote (the package, you may recall, that Republicans said would produce a deep recession), along with a balanced budget agreement that President Clinton signed in 1997. Most economists would say that these acts of fiscal discipline helped produce the sensational economy of the late 1990s.

Today, if anything, CBO is underestimating the vast borrowing binge the federal government is about to undertake so long as the Bush administration is the drunken sailor with the national credit card. Progressive Policy Institute senior economist Jeff Lemieux adjusted the CBO estimates to reflect what will happen if:

• The tax cuts enacted since 2001, which CBO assumes will vanish in 2011 due to the phony sunsets placed in tax legislation to disguise their real cost, are in fact made permanent.
• Discretionary spending (which includes defense) grows at least as fast as the economy, an extremely conservative estimate.
• A Medicare drug benefit costing at least $400 billion over 10 years is enacted (both Houses of Congress have passed, and the administration supports, a drug benefit that will cost at least that much).
• Congress acts to index or otherwise adjust the Alternative Minimum Tax, which will soon start to bite into upper-middle-class incomes in a politically intolerable way within the next couple of years.

With these vastly more realistic assumptions, Lemieux calculates that the budget deficit will reach a cool half-trillion next year, and will total $6.1 trillion a decade from now, or an alarming five percent of the gross domestic product. The national debt, which we were seriously talking about retiring altogether towards the end of the Clinton administration, would reach $10 trillion a decade hence. At that point, annual debt service alone would be $526 billion, considerably more than today's defense budget. And then, mind you, things would really start to get down and dirty due to the retirement of the baby boom generation, and the massive new Social Security and Medicare costs that phenomenon will entail. Indeed, according to Lemieux, on the Bush administration's present trajectory, deficits will rise from 6 percent of GDP in 2015 to 12 percent by 2025, while the national debt will grow from 60 percent of GDP to 120 percent by 2025.

It's very important for Democrats and responsible Republicans to start talking about these numbers in a simple and vivid way as part of the evaluation of the Bush administration's stewardship of the national budget and the national economy in 2004. These folks are on a reckless path in which our nation's solvency, the vibrancy of our national economy, the ability of government to provide for the common defense and other common needs, and the opportunities to be enjoyed by future generations, are all being sacrificed to a monomaniacal determination to cut taxes on the wealthy without the courage to cut spending to make ends meet.