That number would be even higher, except that the budget also assumes a sudden 17.4 percent jump in tax revenues next year — far more than anything it anticipates from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — followed by uninterrupted economic growth for nine years.

In fiscal 2014 and 2015, it assumes real GDP growth in excess of 4 percent.

If you thought we could go back to the pre-crisis days when deficits of $400 billion were denounced as excessive and enormous, the smallest deficit Obama plans for us is greater than $600 billion.

If Obama intended to make those “hard choices” he’s always talking about, or deep cuts that reflect appreciation of the state of troubled sovereigns in the Western world, he failed. Not only that, he proposed more than $160 billion in new stimulus spending.

He deserves some blame, but probably not Carney’s damning praise. If this budget really reflected Obama’s values on “tackling the debt,” he would be shamed out of even a shameless town like Washington.

In Obama’s defense, he ran up against a wall with this budget. His 10-year blueprint tells the story of what happens when the entitlement state squeezes the life of out of government’s normal functions.

Mandatory government programs and debt service currently account for 65 percent of government spending (and consume 92.5 percent of revenues). By 2022, they will account for 77 percent of spending.

The problem only becomes worse after this budget’s 10-year time horizon. Big Government is reaching its own breaking point.

Liberals often assume that the military-industrial complex drives our budget problems. The numbers in this budget shatter that illusion, and also conservatives’ illusion that the abolition of a few Cabinet agencies can solve anything. Obama makes real cuts to national security spending, yet the debt continues to rise.

The elimination of the entire Defense Department — including pink slips for every officer and ground pounder in the military — would not bring next year’s budget into balance.

Obama’s avoidance of leadership on entitlement reform throughout his entire presidency so far — and obviously, he has very good political reasons to avoid it this year — gave him no choice but to present a budget that looks like this one.

Along its trajectory, if the United States ever pays down debt, it will only be by eliminating all the services it provides other than building bombs and writing checks to old people.

In a better world — one with more leaders and fewer demagogues — we would have decided long before this point that government’s promises have to be more realistic.

We have seen the results of unrealistic promises this week in Greece, where attempts to remedy an already impossible situation have been met with violence and riots. It doesn’t have to come to that here, but we would be foolish to think it never could.

And the next president, if he is any good, will never present a budget like this one from Obama. He will instead grab the third rails of Medicare and Social Security immediately and gamble his entire presidency on reform.

David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].