Back in December, when Congress was getting ready to increase the national debt ceiling by $2 trillion (that’s $2,000,000,000,000), I wrote a piece about trying to imagine that amount of money. It’s such a ridiculously large number that it boggles the mind and remains an abstraction, which makes it all the more insidious since it doesn’t seem real. Since we can’t easily get our arms around it, we shrug and return to American Idol.

In this second part, however, “mind boggling” refers not to the size of the debt or the projected annual deficits, but to the attitudes and mentality of some of our so-called leaders.

The Obama administration has released it budget for fiscal year 2011. Obama is ostensibly experiencing a fiscal awakening, if you judge him by his words. Obama, unfortunately, is either completely delusional, or he’s an extremely good liar. Frankly, I am not sure which it is, but it’s either one or the other. Why would I describe him so harshly? Because the evidence is so clear. Powerline shows us just how clearly his words conflict with reality:

"[O]ur government is deeply in debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy." So he proposes to put the country far more deeply in debt through profligacy of a sort that was undreamed of just a few years ago.

Obama said: "[W]e can't simply move beyond this crisis; we have to address the irresponsibility that led to it, and that includes the failure to rein in spending...." But his budget doesn't rein in spending, it increases it over last year's precedent-shattering total by around $100 billion.

Obama said: "[I]t would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children's future to pay our way today...." His budget, in just the next year, will borrow $1.6 trillion against our children's future to pay our way today.

Either Obama has completely lost touch with reality, or he thinks we have.

There is no question that both Republicans and Democrats have contributed to the fiscal crisis (and I don’t use that word lightly) we now face, but the Democrats, lately at least, are so much worse. As Powerline notes, “In 2006, the last year in which the Republicans controlled Congress, the deficit was $248 billion--one-seventh what Obama proposes for next year.”

National Review sums it up this way:

But what had been a chronic problem that all involved knew needed corrective action has now become, in the Obama years, a full-fledged disaster in the making.

According to the president’s budget, released yesterday, the federal deficit for 2010 is expected to reach nearly $1.6 trillion, a record. And that would come on top of a $1.4-trillion deficit in 2009 and before another $1.3-trillion deficit in 2011. Between 1789 and 2008, the U.S. government borrowed a total of $5.8 trillion. But in just the first three years of the Obama administration, the government is set borrow $4.4 trillion more.

And even that wouldn’t be the end of it. If the Obama budget is adopted in full, federal borrowing will top $18 trillion by 2020. Over the period 2011 to 2020, the president’s plan is to run deficits totaling an astounding $8.5 trillion.

Honestly, I could go on and on with examples of mind-boggling irresponsibility by politicians. The news is replete with examples.

Liberals love the word “sustainability.” If there is one path for our country that’s indisputably unsustainable, it’s adopting budgets that add about a trillion dollars a year to our national debt.

I hate alarmism, but there are times when an alarm really and truly needs to be sounded and heeded. Conservatives (as distinct from Republicans) have been saying for decades that government is too big, way too big. Often the sentiment was prompted not as much as much by a concern for the debt as it was by a philosophical notion about the proper role and limitations of government. OK, it turns out that, unsurprisingly, conservatism was right. But, ideology aside, we are heading for a fiscal shipwreck of epic proportions. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the wreck is coming regardless.

I might be missing a possibility, but it seems to me that we will: (A) raise taxes so high that economic growth grinds to a near permanent halt, (B) face higher and higher interest rates on our debt as other nations, China in particular, refuse to buy more and more of our debt without being compensated for the increasing risk of default, (C) start printing more money to pay the ever increasing debt service, which will lead to runaway inflation, and/or (D) we simply decide to default on our loans, much as many “under-water” homeowners have done recently, which would put the United States of America in the same financial category as third-world countries.

I don’t see any way around it. Even if the Dems lose control of the House and Senate, even if Obama the Delusional loses his bid for reelection, even if we have real conservatives running the entire government, I don’t know that we can turn the ship around. There are so many vested interests relying on the myriad of government departments, services, programs, agencies, entitlements, and policies that any actual, fundamental downsizing of government might be politically impossible. Too many people want the bacchanalia to continue, tomorrow be damned.

Still, we have to try. Electing fiscal conservatives (this is not a time to focus on social issues) is our only hope. For our part, we the citizens have to be willing to support candidates and elected officials when they tell about economic realties and propose unpleasant solutions. Every government program, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and foreign aid, needs to put on the table.

Pain is coming. If we are to minimize it, we have to act responsibly, maturely, seriously, and soon.