When Moody's, the bond rating agency, threatened to downgrade the creditworthiness of the U.S. government if the ceiling on the national debt isn't raised by Aug. 2, the threat was reported on the evening news on CBS and NBC, and on the front pages of many newspapers.

But journalists paid less attention when Moody's and Standard & Poor's said they would downgrade U.S. bonds if federal debt isn't cut by $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

If our credit rating is downgraded, the Treasury department will have to pay a higher rate of interest to sell its bonds, ballooning the deficit. Americans will have to pay more for home and auto loans, since the interest rates on them is tied to what Treasury pays.

Raising the debt ceiling would permit Treasury to borrow more money, thus avoiding default in the short term. But borrowing more makes the risk of default greater in the long run.

The long run isn't very far off. Standard & Poor's said Monday it will downgrade U.S. Treasuries in 90 days if a deal to reduce the debt by $4 trillion isn't made by then.

Here's why Standard & Poor's is worried. In 2001, the national debt was $5.95 trillion. It's $14.34 trillion now, a 141 percent increase in just 10 years.

When debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, economic growth is reduced one to two percentage points, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have estimated. A percentage point decline means 1 million fewer jobs, according to the president's Council of Economic Advisers.

Debt is now about 95 percent of GDP and going higher. The Treasury Department announced last week the budget deficit for this fiscal year will be larger than last year's $1.29 trillion.

So you'd think President Barack Obama would be as worried as are the bond rating agencies, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

Mr. Obama presented in January a budget the Congressional Budget Office estimated would add $9.5 trillion over 10 years to our current $13.4 trillion national debt. It was so frivolous not a single Democrat in the Senate voted for it.

In a speech at George Washington University April 13, the president said he'd revised his budget to reduce spending by $4 trillion over 12 years. But he provided no details.

Journalists have reported Mr. Obama's claim he offered $1.7 trillion in spending cuts during closed door negotiations with Republicans, but, again, the president has provided no details.

The president isn't alone in fiscal delinquency. Senate Democrats haven't presented a budget in more than two years, even though the law requires the majority party to do so each year.

House Republicans passed again Tuesday a detailed spending plan to trim nearly $6 trillion from the budget Mr. Obama submitted in January.

He'll veto the GOP's "cut, cap and balance" plan if it gets to his desk, the president said. He wants a "more balanced" plan that includes tax increases. Roughly $1.75 trillion in new taxes already are scheduled to kick in in 2013, but Mr. Obama didn't mention them.

The problem is spending. Outlays rose from $1.863 trillion in FY 2001 to an estimated $3.819 trillion in this fiscal year, 105 percent in 10 years. The federal government now consumes 24 percent of the gross domestic product. (Since 1903, federal spending has averaged a hair over 20 percent of GDP).

Another way to indicate the problem is spending -- specifically, Mr. Obama's spending -- if federal spending were held to what it was during President Bush's last year in office, deficits likely would be eliminated in four years.

Since World War II, federal tax revenues have averaged 18 percent of GDP. Income tax rates varied widely during this period, and there were both booms and busts. But tax revenues never exceeded 20.6 percent of GDP. That seems to be a ceiling -- no matter what economic conditions are or how high rates are raised -- and it suggests the budget cannot be balanced unless spending is held below 20 percent of GDP.

So tax hikes can't close the budget gap. But they could clobber the moribund recovery, making the deficit worse.

Democrats want Republicans to accept real tax hikes in exchange for mostly phantom spending cuts. Because they are unwilling to do so, many journalists describe Republicans as "intransigent." But the truly intransigent, it seems to me, are those who want to go on spending as if there were no problem.