By the numbers

President Obama slipped out of Washington on Friday for a brief family vacation -- just in time to avoid certain questions about more bad economic news.

No doubt timed to both shield the president and coincide with the slowest part of the news cycle, the administration dropped a bombshell late Friday, admitting that it expects the budget deficit over the next decade to be $2 trillion higher than anticipated.

Previously, White House number crunchers said they expected the country to be $7 trillion in the red over the next decade. Now that figure has been revised to $9 trillion.

Hey, what's a little 29 percent mistake?

Expect White House budget officials -- sans President Obama -- to try to sugar coat the matter this week when they formally issue the new numbers. They underestimated the effect of the recession, overestimated the speed of a recovery, etc., etc., etc.

But the fact remains that the administration earlier this year defended the $7 trillion as manageable because it wasn't expected to exceed 3 percent of the gross domestic product. At $9 trillion, the deficit will almost certainly blow past 4 percent of GDP.

What will be the new talking point?

The figure highlights in stark terms that reality had better take hold sometime soon inside the beltway. Soaking the rich won't get us out of this mess.

Neither will pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq or blaming George W. Bush.

The president owes it to the American people to lay out in harsh specifics how he expects to pass a huge new job-killing tax on energy through cap-and-trade; offer everybody "free" universal health care; and hand out billions and billions in "stimulus" pork, all without spending the country into oblivion and further crippling an already fragile economy.

Simply put, Mr. Obama's agenda is unsustainable. To believe that cap-and-trade or government-run health care will save Washington money in the long run is to exhibit an Alice in Wonderland grasp of reality, a childlike faith not yet encumbered with the cold shower of reason and logic.

"New Deficit Projections Pose Risk to Obama's Agenda," blared Reuters News Service last week in a story on the budget revisions.

We can only hope.