During the recent Republican convention, there were two invisible presences that haunted the proceedings. One was House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, the unquestioned Big Dog of the GOP pack that runs Congress, who was kept away from the podium lest he undercut Zell Miller's role as the angriest mutt in the kennel. And the other ghostly presence was the federal budget crisis engineered by the president and the Republican Congress, one of the overriding realities of the Bush record that was never mentioned.

But reality can only be obscured for so long. And yesterday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued new forecasts of present and future budget deficits that are by any measurement alarming.

Expect the administration to get all excited about the fact that the CBO's estimate for the deficit is "only" $422 billion for 2004, compared with an earlier estimate of $477 billion. (As John Kerry noted: "Only George W. Bush could celebrate over a record budget deficit.") But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, this slightly-less-ominous number results not from any sunny assessment of the economy, and certainly not from any actions the administration has taken to reduce spending. No, it's "likely due to adverse economic developments -- higher-than-expected inflation and greater-than- expected concentration of income among those high on the income scale... [resulting] in somewhat higher tax revenues than would otherwise be collected."

And if the deficit is "only" $422 billion -- up from $375 billion in 2003 -- when you take out borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund, it's actually $571 billion.

But here's the really scary part. If the president gets his way, and his tax cuts are made permanent, and his defense spending requests are implemented, then (as the Center summarizes CBO's findings) "projected deficits will not fall below $335 billion in any year, will average $440 billion over the next decade, and will total approximately $4.4 trillion over the ten-year period."

You cannot grow your way out of these kinds of deficits; indeed, CBO is assuming robust economic growth for the foreseeable future. And this sea of red ink positions the country horribly for the future costs associated with the retirement of the baby boom generation.

Despite the happy-talk in some Republican circles that "deficits don't matter," they clearly do, in three ways: (1) $4.4 trillion in public debt cannot help but boost long-term interest rates, as Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has constantly pointed out; (2) annual deficits of up to a half-trillion dollars cannot help but reduce the country's ability to deal with future challenges, including impossible-to-foresee costs associated with the war on terrorism; and (3) somebody will ultimately have to pay the bills, and given the administration's determination to shift the federal tax burden from income earned by inheritance and investment to income earned from work, that means a pre-programmed tax increase of potentially massive proportions for working families.

These future tax increases may now be invisible, but they are as real as Tom DeLay's power on Capitol Hill, and the radically deteriorating federal balance sheet under George W. Bush's stewardship of the public treasury.

This is not simply an economic issue: it's a moral issue. Middle-class families have to balance their household budgets, and they shouldn't have to bear the brunt of this administration's refusal to do the same.