Maxed Out

Via Atrios comes a disspiriting graph, produced by Reuters, illustrating our projected even-more-of-a-record-than-we-thought record defecits:

And no, it's not just the War on Terror putting us in the hole: the percentage increase in non-defense discretionary spending has been almost as great as the defense increase in recent years. Of course, the central culprit here is the recession, which probably just has to be waited out. An unfortunate feature of politics is that it's almost never a live option for an elected official or candidate to say: "yep, this is pretty bad, but I don't have a brilliant recovery plan—we just have to wait for the economy to bounce back."