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Opinion: Memo to Deficit Commission: It's the Spending, Stupid
This week, federal red ink topped $1 trillion. And there's still three months to go before the government's accounting year finishes. To put that in some perspective, the entire federal budget didn't reach $1 trillion until 1987.

So what to do in the face of these gargantuan deficits? Raise taxes? Cut spending? Hope the economy grows fast enough to close the gap? All of the above?

President Barack Obama appointed a bipartisan commission to look at the options, and it made some news this past weekend when its co-captains spoke to the nation's governors. But you don't need a commission to know what the solution is. You just need a calculator.

The simple fact is that deficits are out of control right now because spending is out of control. That's the pretty obvious lesson drawn from looking at the past 60 years of federal budget data.

As the chart nearby shows, since 1950, tax revenues have been remarkably stable. Despite endless machinations, reforms, tweaks to the tax code, new breaks, tax hikes and tax cuts, tax revenues as a share of the total economy (called gross domestic product, or GDP) have stuck steadily at right around 18 percent.

What has changed is spending....

...The Obama administration is putting the country on a course over the next decade to spend at levels unseen since World War II, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Obama's budget plan. By 2020, the CBO expects federal spending to account for 25.2 percent of GDP -- higher than any year in modern history, except three during the war....