Pay As You Go -- PAYGO -- is a wonderful platitude in Washington, but a bit whimsical after the president's own Office of Management and Budget acknowledges the federal deficit over the next 10 years will not be the $7 trillion it had been projecting but more than $9 trillion. This year alone it will be more than a trillion and a half.

Numbers like these are incomprehensible, meaning that a problem of such massive importance is usually ignored by those of us who don't like numbers in the first place.

Unfortunately, they're vitally important. Somewhere, sometime, someone in government will have to say "No." The country can't afford to be in such hock. Each and every president pays lip service to the need to rein in spending. This president and his economic team insist they mean it. Really.

More of the hated numbers: The new projections triple last year's deficit. They represent more than 11 percent of the entire economy. Obviously, it's the sorry state of that economy and the trillions of dollars spent trying to rescue it that have created such huge negatives.

Even so, on the "cheer up things could be worse" side of things, it's not as bad as many thought it would be. Remember TARP -- the Troubled Asset Relief Program? Who could forget? It has cost way less than expected . . . a couple hundred billion less. And there are tiny signs all around that things may be turning around a bit more quickly than the doomsayers had predicted.

No matter what the story these days, one question seems to follow: "So what does it mean to health care reform?" This one is no exception. Republicans jumped all over these projections to say that spending big bucks on health care is folly. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the senior GOP member of the House Ways and Means Committee, (the main tax law committee), told The Washington Post,: "If the House Democrats' unaffordable one-trillion-dollar health care bill wasn't dead before, it should be now."

And of course, the White House Budget Director Peter Orszag retorted that such a view "has it backwards," adding that reform is essential to slowing Medicare and Medicaid expenditures to hold down future deficits.

There is agreement that it will take awhile before the fiscal crisis is turned around. The consensus is unemployment will stay close to 10 percent for the next year or so. There is also agreement that the nation can't afford to allow the deficit to continue to grow. At some point, someone really will have to run things in that "PAYGO" kind of way. Even if the massive expenditures of the past year do bail out the sinking ship for now, inflation, the demands of an aging population and a whole host of other problems will cause us all to go down in a sea of red ink.

The difficulties just ahead will take more to overcome than simply throwing funny money at them. The new deficit projections may be mind-numbing, but they're the warning of a dire future if someone doesn't pay attention.