If that is not bad enough, the CBO's $1,200bn estimate does not even include the forthcoming fiscal stimulus, which is expected to be at least $775bn over two years. President-elect Barack Obama has said we may experience deficits above $1,000bn for years to come.

What many do not realise is that the US has already had its first deficit above $1,000bn – in fiscal 2008, according to the accrual-based financial statements issued in December 2008. (Unfortunately not many read these statements, including elected officials and other policymakers.) But what transformed our large and growing surpluses at the outset of the Bush administration into growing deficits and mounting debt by the end of it? First, President George W. Bush did not keep his pledge to be fiscally responsible. As I have found during my 15 years leading government agencies spanning the Reagan, Bush (41), Clinton and Bush (43) administrations, it does not matter what politicians say: it is what they do or fail to do that counts.

Unfortunately, Mr Bush is likely to go down as one of the most – if not the most – fiscally irresponsible presidents in US history. Who would have expected that a self-professed conservative would allow the statutory budget controls – which helped move us from large, rising deficits in the early 1990s to large, growing surpluses by the decade's end – to expire at the end of 2002? Who would have thought there would be no call for “shared sacrifice” after the attacks of September 11 2001to finance the “war on terror”? And who would have thought that Mr Bush would back the largest expansion of federal entitlement programmes since President Lyndon Johnson? The enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill added more than $8,000bn to the federal government's already huge, unfunded Medicare promises. Johnson was criticised in the 1960s for wanting to have both “guns and butter”; Mr Bush pursued “guns, butter and tax cuts” all at once.