… an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him — using magic in which he is not yet fully trained. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know how. Not knowing how to control the enchanted broom, the apprentice splits it in two with an axe, but each of the pieces becomes a new broom and takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now at twice the speed.
Synopsis of Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Jim Geraghty at NRO posts the rather dismaying facts about our mushrooming deficit, and he does so in a headline that reminds us of the last presidential campaign, when a much, much smaller deficit was (justifiably) reason to wrangle a political party away from the reins of government: “President ‘Cut-the-Deficit-in-Half’ Spends More, Again.”

Geraghty gives year-by-year figures of the deficit (which, by the way, he cautions readers to understand is not the same as the $15.2 trillion national debt). These facts alone are damning:

You’ll also recall that in 2007, the deficit was… $160 billion. You know, about 12 percent of the total deficit Obama’s budget would create this year. … We’re up to $169.2 billion in the first four months of this fiscal year. Again, we’re paying more in interest in the debt in the first four months of the year than the sum of the total deficit in 2007.

Epilogue: I suppose the main difference between Obama and the sorcerer’s apprentice is that the latter at least temporarily cut the problem in two. Obama skipped that step and goes straight into inundation.