Four months late, the Congress has produced a budget, something most families, businesses and countries can mange without Sturm und Drang. But in Washington, it counts as a titanic achievement.

Unfortunately, the Titanic in this case is the ship, and the iceberg is the looming debt. Once it was considered almost sinful to run whopping budget deficits year after year since a most unpleasant collision with reality would inevitably arrive.

The last time we amassed a national debt of the present proportions was during World War II, an emergency that justified extreme measures. The postwar boom erased it, though defense spending remained high and social programs increased.

Nevertheless, a generation that remembered the Great Depression acted responsibly under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Until the so-called Reagan Revolution. It achieved one revolutionary change by falling for the siren song of supply side or voodoo economics. It promulgated the fantasy that cutting tax revenues would so juice the economy that tax revenues would increase. Voila, the free lunch.

It never worked, of course. Republican administrations began to run up huge deficits leaving the next Democratic incumbent to clean up the debris. Under Clinton, annual deficits were briefly eliminated and an actual surplus achieved, only to have W spend trillions on war and unfunded entitlements.

Then, Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” But they did. They left Obama with a sea of red Ink and a financial collapse second only to the Great Depression. Now, under Trump, centrist deficit hawks of both parties like Bob Kerry, Paul Tsongas, Mitt Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Pete Domenici, Prescott Bush, Warren Rudman, Russell Long, Pete Peterson, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, have become as extinct as the dodo.

We are left with Tea Party libertarians like Rand Paul who want to eliminate the deficit by eliminating almost all that government does. This is clearly a non-starter. At the other extreme are social democrats who favor a lot more social spending and a lot more taxation. Another politically impossibly hard sell. Unfortunately, we are left with a majority of elected cowards or trimmers who pay lip service to fiscal austerity while letting the bon temps rouler.

So, a Republican Congress that bewails a national debt of $20 trillion, conservatively calculated, has just agreed to increase it by several trillion more over the next few years. The huge tax cut, 80% of which goes to corporations and the already rich, will add another $1.5 to $2 trillion to our indebtedness.

On top of that we will now borrow almost another half trillion to spend on the military, on domestic spending, childcare, opioid treatment, veterans programs, disaster relief and the like. Worthy investments, perhaps, but what will be cut to pay for them? Nothing. What taxes will be raised to pay for them? None. And on top of this Trump wants to borrow another trillion or more for infrastructure.

All of this has produced a fiscal 2018 budget that projects a $1 trillion deficit. And next year the same, and, if no one comes to their senses, forever. But nothing lasts forever. The iceberg of debt gets bigger and bigger. The collision comes closer and closer.

Yet those at the helm of the Titanic do nothing to alter course. Why? It would be painful and unpopular. It’s more fun to hang around the ship’s casino and gamble away the future of the passengers in steerage than to chart a safer course.

Giving away things by simply saying, “Charge it,” is popular. Paying bills is a drag. Why worry? The music will never stop. The ship of state sail on. If trouble is ahead, it won’t come until the crew of perpetrators has abandoned ship, leaving the rest of us without a lifeboat.

But we elected the crew because they promised a free ride. Alas, it doesn’t work that way. We should have listened to an occasional pessimist rather than all the happy talk. Thomas Hardy, perhaps, He said of the Titanic in “The Convergence of the Twain,”

…as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace and hue
In shadowy silent distance, the Iceberg too.