On Monday, January 13, the Treasury Department released data showing that over calendar year 2019 the federal government ran a $1 trillion budget deficit. On Tuesday, January 14, candidates for president proposed to make the budget deficit worse.

Now, to be sure, the calendar year is not the standard unit of measurement for the federal budget – it is the October 1 to September 30 fiscal year. And the $1 trillion barrier is artificial – in the same sense that some people in the early days of jet aviation thought that a pilot who exceeded the sound barrier would have his ears fall off.

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A $1 trillion deficit is not a tripwire. But it is far too high. Deficits at today’s level are piling up the national debt faster than our collective income – our GDP – is growing. We cannot allow that to go on. Your family could not survive a mortgage debt growing faster than your income. Neither can your country.

All presidential candidates have a list of things that they want to do – on both the tax and the spending sides of the budget. Those ideas are intended to catch your attention. So naturally, they cost money. Many of those ideas (free health care, free child care, free college) would be highly attractive – if they were really free. But our nation’s economy is already at risk from the burgeoning debt.

And “risk” is the keyword. The public debt, relative to the size of our economy, is approaching its highest level in our nation’s history. But this is not like those record-high-debt days at the end of World War II, when despite all of the blood and the tears, the troops were coming home to work, and the United States dominated the economic world.

Today, the baby boomers are retiring from work, and the rest of the economic world is fighting to take our lunch.

Today’s debt is already zooming at escape velocity. We are one shock – a national security episode, a natural disaster, an international financial crisis – away from a crisis of confidence in our own Treasury. And such a confidence crisis will be like smoke in a crowded theater. Investors will not walk to the exits on our Treasury securities, they will run. And by the time we see that crisis, it will already be too late. Prudent public stewards should not expose our economy to such risks.

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But presidential candidates have made expansive promises from the early days of the Republic. And voters always have wanted promises of pleasure, not pain. Time was when the committed public stewards said, and demonstrated, that their plans were “paid for.” You don’t often hear that much from our candidates these days.