If at least one party in Washington, D.C., didn't know it, the United States has a spending problem.
The Congressional Budget Office announced last week that "the long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically over the past several years" and forecast that by 2040 spending on government health care, retirement programs and interest on the debt will raise the federal debt to more than 100 percent of economic output.
In other words, the debt to begin the year will be more than the entire amount of all the goods and services the country could expect to produce in that year.
The nonpartisan in-house congressional think tank made its announcement on the same day that President Barack Obama said he would no longer abide by the 2011 sequestration budget agreement he signed that raised the federal debt ceiling and forced automatic cuts in spending programs if new spending cuts were not determined by a bipartisan group.
Since the group did not reach an agreement, the sequestration cuts went into effect. They, in turn, have been given credit by most economists for the drop in the federal deficit.
But Obama now says he'll veto fiscal 2016 budget bills that include the sequestration cuts.
That 2040 stuff? That'll be Malia and Sasha's problem.
The problem is, their dad is the one who has made the long-term outlook so bad, according to the CBO. Indeed, spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus Obamacare subsidies and other health care programs, will rise from an average 6.5 percent of gross domestic product (GNP) over the past 50 years to 14.2 percent by 2040.
That debt percentage of GNP was last seen during the final year of World War II.
Since Obama took office, the debt has increased around 70 percent, from $10.6 trillion to $18.3 trillion.
And under current law, spending on everything but entitlements and interest payments would drop by 2040 from 11.6 percent of the GNP to 6.9 percent.
So taxpayers, according to the CBO, could be earning more but getting less from the government programs that matter to them because they're paying more of their income to the Internal Revenue Service because of parameters in the tax code that are not indexed for inflation or real growth.
Former CBO director Doug Elmendorf had sounded the most recent warning before the House Budget Committee in January, saying the rise was a "trend that could not be sustained" and one which would eventually heighten "the risk of a fiscal crisis."
In the short term, the economic forecast doesn't look as bad, with debt remaining relatively stable - at about 74 percent of GNP - through 2020. But then it rises steadily, growing to 78 percent of GNP by 2025 and 103 percent by 2040.
And the federal deficit, which has fallen from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to an estimated $474 billion in fiscal 2016, is expected to reach trillion-dollar levels again within 10 years.
"At some point," the CBO said, "investors would begin to doubt the government's willingness or ability to meet its debt obligations, requiring it to pay much higher interest costs in order to continue borrowing money. Such a fiscal crisis would present policymakers with extremely difficult choices and would probably have a substantial negative impact on the country."
The office also warned that further debt increases would be detrimental to economic growth, which has been no better than tepid since the end of the Great Recession.
It's the how-to-fix-it question that rankles. Politicians in both parties have been too willing to, as Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., likes to say, "kick the can down the road" and leave the big decisions for future lawmakers. That's because long-term solutions involve meaningful changes in taxing or spending policies, or both.
But the major parties have wide differences on what those changes ought to be, with Democrats preferring to tax and spend and Republicans opting to spend less and cut taxes.
It's also a no-brainer that those meaningful changes should involve entitlement programs, but Democrats rarely agree to make changes there and Republicans fear the backlash if they suggest as much.
It's a political game of chicken that is making things worse for Sasha and Malia and the rest of the country.