In other words, President Obama is planning to permanently increase the scale of government borrowing -- even before we are hit by the fiscal tidal wave that will come when the bulk of the baby boom generation retires and begins collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The truth is this: Our federal government has been wading ever deeper into red ink for a full half-century, and President Obama is now planning to wade deeper and faster than any president who has gone before him.

According to the Bureau of the Public Debt, the overall federal debt has increased every single year for the past 50 years. The last time it declined from one year to the next was from 1956 to 1957.

Overall federal debt increased even in each year from 1998 to 2001, when the OMB was calculating annual federal surpluses. This seeming contradiction, budget experts tell me, results from the fact that when they calculate the annual surplus or deficit they do not account for the interest the government pays itself on paper for the money it has borrowed out of the Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement trust funds to pay for current expenditures in other government programs.

The interest paid on the money the government has borrowed from Social Security and Medicare taxes to fund other things does not require the government to dole out real cash today. It will require the government to dole out real cash tomorrow, however, when the number of retired people receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits balloons compared to the number of younger working people paying taxes to support those programs.

Every dollar President Obama borrows and spends, like every dollar President Bush borrowed and spent, adds to the permanent burden of government laid on the backs of our children.

Last year, then-Comptroller General David Walker reported that every American household would have to put up $455,000 to cover the $53 trillion gap that already exits between the entitlement benefits promised to living Americans and the tax revenue currently expected to pay for those entitlements.

On top of this, President Obama has just promised to add more than $2 trillion to the national debt over the next four years.

To expand on a metaphor I used in a previous column, America is heading down the blind alley of big government toward the brick wall of national bankruptcy -- and President Obama is now putting his foot on the accelerator. What's next: Liberals will use the coming crash as an argument for even more big government, quite possibly in the form of socialized medicine that seeks to control government spending by rationing the health care of all Americans.