Two Trillion Dollar Deficit

That's right. You'll see it on the news tomorrow. But you read it here first.

Tomorrow, the Congressional Budget Office will forecast that the 2009-2010 federal budget will run at a staggering, unbelievable, mind-blowing, and scarcely comprehensible two trillion dollar deficit.

My calculator cannot go that high. I get "2E+12" instead. Carl Sagan never talked about numbers that big.

The debt that Obama inherited from Bush was about ten trillion dollars. It took the United States 234 years (starting with the first appropriations for General George Washington's army by the Continental Congress in 1775) to build up a debt of $10,000,000,000,000. President Obama will preside over a 20% increase in that debt in one year.

My biggest reservation about Barack Obama as President was that I did not think the country would be able to afford him. And that concern, I am sorry to report, is becoming justified by events as they have occurred. Listen to the NPR report I linked to above -- the White House is not planning on slowing down its ambitious plans to overhaul health care, education, and energy a bit.