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.

I enjoy writing now and then, but I realize that I am not a clever or talented writer. I think that’s why I enjoy reading works by those who are -- I’m a weekend golfer amazed by watching Tiger Woods, oops, I mean Phil Mickelson, play.

Here’s a great example by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: A No-Fly List? Count Me In. Jonah’s funny, clever, and intellectually interesting all at the same time. I love it.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in today’s paper, called “The Audacity of Debt,” in which they discuss the impending vote by Congress to raise the national debt ceiling by almost $2 trillion. It got me thinking about the size of that number.

First, note how much easier it is to write and, more importantly, read “$2 trillion” rather than “$2,000,000,000,000.” There are so many zeros involved in the latter that one has to stop and count them to understand the figure.

Second, how much is $2,000,000,000,000? What’s the best way to visualize it? Is there a way to visualize it?

Here’s one way: imagine an airplane filled with $2,000,000,000,000 separated into bags of a million dollars each. Imagine that the pilot of this airplane takes off and heads due north at a speed of 300 miles per hour. The copilot’s job is to drop one of the bags containing a million dollars out of the airplane every time the plane travels a mile.

Before we go any further, think about how much money a million dollars is. How much difference would a million dollars make to you and your family? How much difference would a million dollars make to a small business or a local charity? Remember that impact.

Back to the airplane dropping a million dollars a minute, how far could the plane travel before the $2,000,000,000,000 ran out? Keep in mind that, at 300 miles per hour, the plane is dropping five million-dollar bags every minute.

A thousand miles? Five thousand miles? 10,000 miles? Around the entire Earth, a distance of 24,860 miles? I am afraid none of these is close. You have to think bigger.

You see, $2,000,000,000,000 is equal to 2,000,000 bags of $1,000,000 each. That right, the plane could travel 2,000,000 miles, or 80 times around the Earth, dropping a million dollars out every 12 seconds, before running out of money.

It would take the plane 6,667 hours to do so, equal to 278 days of continuous, 24/7 flying.

And that’s just the increase in the national debt that Congress will be approving shortly. Shall we talk about the total debt of $14,000,000,000,000?

You might think that, as much as I have written about climate change (click on the “climate change” tag to the left), I’d have been all over the scandal involving the East Anglia scientists who hid and changed data to fit the “consensus” and who tried to silence skeptics. The truth is that my reaction isn’t much more than a big sigh of relief.

Relief that my instincts regarding the global warming promoters were right.

Relief that skeptics, such as myself, were justified in their skepticism.

Relief that monstrous schemes like “cap and trade” are dead in the United States, or at least mortally wounded.

Relief that there will be (or should be) calls for a more open and critical look at the actual data, rather than a blind devotion to the global warming religion.

Relief that the scientific community might purge some of these charlatans.

I realize the scandal hasn’t gotten much attention in the liberal media, but I’m not sure that matters much. I was going to look through the last several Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspapers to see if they deigned to mention it, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t, at least not in a substantial way, and frankly, who cares? I long ago came to the conclusion that the principle weakness and distinguishing characteristic of today’s liberalism is its willingness to set aside facts, truth, and logic in favor of policy objectives. Inconvenient events are mentally discarded.

Global warming, as political scaffolding with which to construct an ever larger government, is thankfully collapsing. Climate change, as an actual physical phenomenon, will continue in its cycles of cooling and warming, as it has done for millions of years, oblivious to the affairs of man.

The New York Times published an article today that is entitled, in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at least, “U.S. Debt Costs May Soon Soar.” I don’t have time for a long response today, so allow me this brief response.

The Herald-Tribune attached this subhead, “Does Uncle Sam basically have a $12 trillion adjustable rate mortgage?” The article and that subhead make it pretty clear that the national debt is a new discover for liberal newspapers.

Oh, by the way, NYT and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, welcome to the Tea Party movement.

The article is mostly a well-written essay on the frightening implications of having such a gargantuan (if there is a more appropriate adjective, I don’t know what it is) debt, but it falls down on three points.

First, it doesn’t mention the possibility that other nations (China, really) might decide to stop buying our debt, and the complete chaos that would ensue if they did.

Second, even though the deficit under the Obama administration is exploding to unprecedented levels, what with the trillion-dollar “stimulus” package, and now Obama’s government takeover of healthcare, not once is Obama’s name mentioned.

Third, it tries to make the case that the massive spending by the man-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned was “widely judged to have been a necessary response.” Yet, no one is quoted to support that claim, and the Obama Administration’s own estimates and data show it to be, without question, a miserable failure:

When a liberal newspaper uses the words, “widely judged” or “the science is settled” or “most experts agree,” you can be pretty sure that “widely judged” should be qualified with “in our newsroom,” that the science is anything but settled, and that “most experts” refers to either some sort of wishful abstraction or to the kind of “experts” that frequent the same cocktail parties as NYT editors.

While liberals may be just now discovering the national debt (actually, I should say, “rediscovering” since they had a similar awakening when it came to the cost of the Iraq war), I am pretty confident that they will forget all about it when it comes to reducing spending, but it will be front-and-center when it comes to the idea of raising taxes. In fact, my well-seasoned cynicism tells me that this is what the article is really about: pin no blame for the exploding deficit on Obama, but provide him cover when he raises taxes. Just wait.