Is there any room for optimism?

Apparently not.

For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the final deficit tally will be about $1.4 trillion. Measured against the size of the economy, that's 9.9% of gross domestic product, bigger than any year since 1945. As a share of GDP, tax and other revenues are lower (15%) and spending higher (25%) than anytime in the past 50 years.

The U.S. has confronted big deficits before. "Numbers like this will eventually prompt corrective measures, just as a stark but less worrisome budget outlook did in 1990," Goldman Sachs economists assured clients last week.

This time will be tougher.

We are starting from a much deeper hole. When the economy began climbing out of the deep recession of the early 1980s, federal debt -- the sum of every annual budget deficit -- amounted to less than 30% of the nation's GDP, the value of all the goods and services produced in a year. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was less than 40%. Today, it exceeds 50% of GDP and is rising toward 80%, perhaps 100% of GDP over the next 10 years. Even at today's low interest rates, the federal government spent about $195 billion on interest in fiscal 2009, more than 10 times the entire NASA budget. A rising debt-to-GDP ratio means interest takes an ever-greater slice of the budget, much of that going to the foreigners.