Tell voters the truth?

You may know Evan Thomas as just another liberal white guy on MSNBC (don't they all kind of look alike).

But he's actually got a good piece in Newsweek.President Obama's new federal budget proposal projects, with unusual clarity, that the trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits piling up during the current recession are not just a temporary condition necessitated by hard times, soon to be cured by a return to prosperity. Rather, the red ink threatens to drown us. For many years, federal spending remained about 20 percent of the overall economy. But under Obama it's now a quarter of the economy. The national debt has grown to more than 50 percent of GDP, and according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it could plausibly approach 100 percent of GDP by 2020—a figure not reached since World War II. Unless something drastic happens—like significant tax increases and cuts in those sacred entitlement programs—the cost of the government will continue to outrun revenue by staggering margins.

Well, so what? Can't the government keep on borrowing? During wartime and deep recessions the federal debt has soared and then settled down once peace and prosperity returned. In America, the political classes have always been saved by growth—the wondrous engine of the American economy that has spared the politicians from having to face up to dire choices in taxing and spending.

But a new era of high economic growth is not inevitable. The Next Big Thing—say, the long-awaited green revolution in high tech, alternative energy sources, and the like—should not be confused with the Next Sure Thing. What if government spending really does outrun growth in a way that chokes the economy before it can take off again? Will the Chinese—our rivals for world economic supremacy and the power that goes with it—indefinitely support our profligate ways by buying our debt?

The federal government can, it's true, always print more money. Not so the states, many of which also have balanced-budget requirements. Dominated by the political power of public-employee unions demanding generous pensions and benefits, big state governments—California, New York, New Jersey—are starting to go over the fiscal cliff. California was driven to pay some of its obligations with IOUs, not cash. There are dark mutterings about "failed states"—state governments that are utterly dysfunctional.

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