It’s no longer popular in Washington these days to discuss the nation’s long-term debt problem, but a report released on Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office provided a stark reminder that a looming crisis is approaching, and the longer the nation waits to address it, the more difficult it will be to avert.

In the immediate term, with the economy doing better than it had been, annual deficits have shrunk substantially from where they were in the beginning of this decade. But this trend, the CBO has projected, will be short-lived, and deficits will soon be on the rise again, pushing the debt to unsustainable levels.