Bush and his party bill themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility; this puts the lie to that spin. If the tax cuts are made permanent, as the Administration wants, the United States is looking at deficits as far as the eye can see.

The $5.6 trillion surplus once predicted for the 10 years ending in 2011 is now a $2.3 trillion cumulative deficit under the best-case prediction issued by the Congressional Budget Office two weeks ago.

The $8 trillion difference between those numbers has little precedent in American history. The long-term budget forecast has declined as much in the last two years as the total revenue collected by the United States government from 1789 to 1983. (My emphasis.)

The U.S. economy is about $10 trillion a year; that means that by 2011 the deficit will be fully 20% of the entire output of the country. That’s simply unsustainable, and it will require either higher taxes or massive cuts in spending, particularly in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Should the “sole remaining superpower” have the social services equivalent of a third-world nation by reducing those programs? That’s the question our politicians have to face; if they listen to the hard-line conservatives (see Norquist, below) they’ll do precisely that.