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It’s hard for most people to get their brains around a $521 billion deficit. Most of us have a hard enough time envisioning a million dollars, let alone a billion—which is, of course, a thousand million. Try to think about 521 thousand million dollars—which is next year’s budget deficit—and your mind just closes down. A kind of numbness sets in.  

Still, I want you to concentrate on a very practical question. Who’s going to lend the government that 521 billion dollars? In point of fact, it’s going to be the foreigners and the wealthy Americans who buy treasury bonds. And of course, eventually, we—you and I and our children—will have to pay that money back. There was a time not long ago in American history when the nation’s richest citizens helped finance the government by paying a high percentage of their incomes in taxes. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, for example, the highest marginal tax rate was 90 percent. Now, America’s richest citizens finance our government primarily by lending it money.  

Not to worry, though. The president promises to cut the budget deficit in half over the next five years. But here’s the catch. You’ve heard of balloon clauses in loan agreements, haven’t you? A balloon clause says you start out paying back a little bit and then your payments increase until you’re walloped with huge payments later on. The president’s budget is like that. The really big-ticket items hit more than five years from now, starting in 2009.  

Here’s one example. The White House admits that the 10-year cost of the new Medicare drug benefit will be more than half a trillion dollars. But what no one’s saying is that most of this kicks in after 2009, when the baby boomers begin retiring and taking advantage of the drug benefit.  

Or consider the tax cuts. If they’re made permanent, as the president wants, the loss of revenues over the next 10 years will be five and a half trillion dollars. And here’s the kicker: Most of this occurs after 2009. That’s because the tax cuts start out relatively small and grow.  

By the year 2014, according to recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the president’s budget will have added more than 10 trillion dollars to the national debt. And most of this happens after 2009. So cutting the deficit in half over the next five years doesn’t mean all that much, even if the promise is kept. Did you hear me? Ten trillion dollars. That’s ten thousand billion. Ten trillion dollars is just about the value of everything that everyone in this nation produces in an entire year.  

Ten trillion dollars—with the biggest balloon clause in the history of the world.  

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis and the author of Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, out in May from Knopf. He is teaching at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy spring semester.