The latest budget update from the White House confirms what everyone has known for the past six months, that federal deficits are going to fill Washington, D.C. with red ink in coming years, unless there's a big change.

The estimate of the deficit for the current fiscal year has settled back to around $1.6 trillion, up from $459 billion in FY 2008.

Why did the deficit go up so much this year?  It's a combination of three things:

1) The Wall Street bailout approved in 2008
2) The Obama Stimulus plan of 2009
3) The recession, which has caused tax revenues to drop

That loss of tax revenue will continue into next year, and will not only create more red ink at the federal level, but also at the state and local level, too.

How is this mess going to get fixed?  It's going to take a combination of spending cuts and increased revenues most likely.

And it's going to be medicine that neither party likes.

The White House forecast for the fiscal years 2010-2019 didn't show a yearly budget deficit of under $500 billion, totaling $9 trillion in new debt.

Note to lawmakers in Congress - sooner or later, all that red ink is going to cause a major financial headache for the country.

Here is your financial tidbit for today - how many times since the end of World War II has the US government run a budget surplus?

The answer is 12 of those 63 years.  1947, 48, 49, 51, 56, 57, 60 and 69.  Then there was nothing until four straight surpluses from 1998 to 2001.

The problem is that budget deficits in the last 25 years have been getting much larger each year.  And surpluses are very far away when the deficit is over $1 trillion a year.