It’s all trillions anymoreCommentary

Our economy has become so imperiled and the numbers so large that the word million now connotes manageable size and the word billion connotes affordable moderation.

Amid that, and as one gets confronted almost daily by signs of an economic Armageddon, one tends toward numbness.

But we must not remain numb to the report Wednesday. We must feel the real pain of it. We must experience the real fear from it. We must do something real about it, and it won't be a bit of fun.

What happened Wednesday was that the Congressional Budget Office issued its revised projection of the federal budget deficit for this year. It was a report to make billions passé. It turned those $450 billion Bushian deficits of a couple of years ago into strolls through the park, hardly discernible from those ancient Clintonian surpluses.

What the CBO said was that, at the current rate, the federal government will operate this federal fiscal year at a deficit of $1.2 trillion.

If you take an already expected $500 billion deficit and add an emergency $700 billion economic bailout to it, then you find that the arithmetic is not all that tricky.

What the CBO further said was that $1.2 trillion might be the least of it, literally.

For one thing, we have a pending proposal to reform the alternative minimum tax to keep it from hitting so many middle-class taxpayers. For another, we still face the issue of whether to let the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts on elite high incomes expire. If we continue them for the time being, the deficit goes higher.

Then there's this little gem: President-elect Barack Obama intends to kick off his presidency by throwing a hail-Mary pass to try to stimulate this uncommonly dire economy with a package of spending and tax cuts somewhere in the vicinity of $800 billion.

That, if enacted, would come on top of the already compiling $1.2 trillion deficit. A trillion-two here and fourth-fifths of a trillion there, and pretty soon Everett Dirksen will be rolling over in his grave. And we'll all be buried with him, covered in red ink, our survivors turned into orphaned wards of the state, the Chinese state.

What can we do about it?

We can't constrict the budget, at least according to prevailing economists' thinking that you'd be a Herbert Hoover inviting another Great Depression to hunker down right now. Government must spend if no one else will, apparently. Otherwise we'd wither on the vine. Deficit hawks are endangered species anymore.

Then here is the following that your president-elect said about this t-word deficit Wednesday:

First, he named a "chief performance officer," someone to call in all the Cabinet members and go over their budgets line-by-line to ensure efficiency, sort of like Charles Grodin did for that fictional president called "Dave" in that movie of the same name.

This performance officer could do Herculean work and still affect only a subfraction of the budget. That's not to say we don't need that kind of work. The situation compels it, in fact. It's to say you don't really make big dents in the budget that way.

Second, Obama said we must quit merely talking about the real issues of actual budget reform, meaning Social Security and Medicare, and actually do something about them.

Fixing Medicare only requires fixing the health care system. Fixing Social Security means one or more of these three things: Fewer people getting Social Security; everyone still getting it, but less of it; or everyone working longer and waiting longer to get it.

That ought to take care of a lot of your numbness right there.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.