Last week, the LA Times ran a story that said the growing national debt was no big deal, although they did allow that in 20 years we could have serious problems. (They never mentioned Obama’s debt commission once.)

20 years…no big deal, right? Unless you’re my children who will be middle-aged and my grandchildren who will be just entering adulthood. Who’ll get stuck with the tab and the economic malaise sure to come with it.

But forget about them. Spend, spend, spend.

WASHINGTON—A slowly improving economy and recently enacted tax increases will help bring down the federal deficit for the next few years, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, but it will take another $2 trillion in belt-tightening over the next decade to begin to move the federal debt closer to historic levels.

The updated CBO projections landed amid budget battles in Washington, underscoring not only the distance between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending but also the gravity of the nation’s fiscal woes.

CBO projects that if Congress leaves current laws unchanged, the debt will be 77% by 2023, and it will be higher if across-the-board spending cuts are diluted or various expiring tax breaks extended. (The deficit is the difference between spending and revenues in a given year; the debt is the government’s total borrowing, or the sum of past deficits.)