Editorial: Get a grip on debt

President Obama needs to stop blaming his predecessor for the country's ballooning debt and start figuring out what to do about it.

Yes, the administration of George W. Bush irresponsibly ran up big annual deficits.

And Obama did inherit lots of red ink from the government bailouts that Bush initiated last year during the depths of the recession.

But Obama's job now is to put the country on a path out of this black hole of debt. It serves no purpose to point fingers, as he recently did in enumerating the reasons for this year's whopping $1.6 trillion deficit.

The president's Office of Management and Budget revised its estimate of the federal government's total deficits over the next 10 years.

It's ugly: $9.1 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than Obama's budgeteers had forecast in February. (The news from OMB also led to one of the most succinct headlines ever on the Drudge Report: "OMB:OMG")

The projections are worse primarily because the Obama administration now admits it was too optimistic about the pace of economic recovery.

Unemployment is expected to peak around 10 percent and to remain high most of next year. The slower the economy rebounds, the slower the rate of taxes flowing into the Treasury.

The revised estimate is simply more proof that Obama needs to take stronger steps to keep down debt over the long term. And that includes his effort to reform health insurance, which could cost up to $1 trillion over 10 years.

One of the primary reasons for reforming health care is the worthy aim of holding down the government's long-range costs for programs such as Medicare. Obama shouldn't give up on reform. But the solution should be revenue-neutral, and none of the proposals on the table so far accomplishes that aim.

OMB Director Peter Orszag said the next administration budget, to come out in February, will reflect Obama's commitment to limit debt.

It should include a serious effort to follow "pay-as-you-go" budgeting rules, which require any spending increases to be offset elsewhere with budget cuts or tax increases.

The current year's deficit is 11.2 percent of the nation's total economic output - a record since World War II. The long-range projections indicate that the national debt will grow faster than gross domestic product over the next 10 years. This country simply can't keep going that route.

The money spent on bailouts and economic recovery was needed, and it has been helping slowly. If there was any bit of bright news in the mid-year deficit projections, it's that the government didn't spend as much money as Congress authorized to bail out the financial system.

But going forward, Obama needs to show how he intends to put the brakes on the growth in the national debt. The alternative is higher interest rates, inflation, and even fewer jobs.