One way to look at President Obama’s proposed budget for 2011 is to focus on the fact that it includes the largest annual deficit — $1.6 trillion — since World War II. It’s even more revealing to examine Obama’s spending plans for the next five years. There we find a cumulative federal deficit of $5.08 trillion. White House spinmeisters will crow about Obama “cutting” the deficit in half — to $700 billion — by 2013. But the reality is, as the Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill told the Wall Street Journal, “these proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see. It is depressing to discover that we can no longer even aspire to balance the budget once the recession is over.”

As bad as the official numbers are, however, a closer examination of the data behind them makes it clear that future deficits are almost certain to be higher than even the Obama administration now projects. The reason is that Obama, like previous presidents of both parties, too often counts his federal revenue chickens before they hatch. For example, buried deep in the footnotes to the official budget is this concerning expected revenues from a cap-and-trade program: