Rep. Tom Allen comes to Portland tonight (6 p.m., University of Southern Maine) to lead a round of Debtbusters, the Concord Coalition’s citizen exercise in balancing the federal budget by 2002.

But, you ask, didn’t Congress and the president just work out a deal to do that very thing? Didn’t they figure out a way to fill the $600 billion gap between the $1.7 trillion in goodies we want from the government and the 1.1 we’re willing to pay for them?

Sort of, if they fill in a lot of blanks, if everything then goes precisely according to plan and if we’re only concerned about 2002. It’s a one-time, one-year shot. If the world doesn’t end in 2003, we’re in deep trouble.

To understand the depth of our national doo-doo, consider this number — 5,200,000,000. That’s 5.2 trillion. That’s the national debt, that’s the cost of all the toys we’ve bought and played with over the years but haven’t paid for yet. Divide that by our population of 267 million, and every man, woman and child owes $20,000 and change. No personal checks accepted.

How did we do this to ourselves? Or, more precisely, since we have no intention of paying it ourselves, how did we do this to our kids and grandkids?

Lots of ways. One is with what some call checkbook budgeting. Suppose you make $30,000 and year and figure out all the things you want to buy and do will cost $40,000. If you’re smart, you cut back to basic cable, get a new muffler instead of a new car, vacation at Old Orchard Beach instead of St. Thomas.

If you’re the government, you transfer the 10 grand over to your Visa card and worry about it later.

We also have baseline budgeting, the assumption that everything government does, it will forever do more of and at a higher price. Suppose there’s a $10 million program to provide every dog in the land with a flea collar. For next year and every year thereafter, the budget will project a 10 percent increase in the canine population and a 5 percent hike in the cost of collars. Pretty soon, we have a flea collar program that costs more than the Manhattan Project.

Then there’s pork. Spending $5.5 billion for disaster relief is exactly what we should do for those devasted by floods and tornadoes, so why not tack on a few million more to build a parking garage in Cleveland and to renovate a theater in upstate New York? As long as we’re paying farmers not to farm, let’s help McDonalds market burgers overseas. The Navy wants 12 new destroyers, but it’s getting 14 to keep a senator from a shipbuilding state happy. Heck, it’s only $1.6 billion. Have you visited your Lawrence Welk Museum yet?

But the real crusher, of course, is entitlements, all those gifts we give ourselves because we’re entitled. We built a safety net for the needy and turned it into a trampoline on which we all want a turn. Within 30 years, the two biggest entitlements, Social Security and Medicare will run deficits of $1.7 trillion, a number that has a familiar ring because it equals today’s total federal budget. Generation X had better plan on working a lot of overtime.

The Concord Coalition has held its Debtbuster sessions all across the country, and the results have been enlightening, not so much in finding solutions as in demonstrating the problem.

Defense spending gets whacked everywhere, except for those locales dependent upon it. Support for the arts is history, unless the panel is packed with opera lovers and gallery goers. A roomful of renters gleefully scraps the home mortgage interest deduction and a roomful of homeowners across the hall doggedly restores it. Even waste, fraud and abuse seem to have a constituency.

In pondering the new republic forming across the Atlantic, the 18th century Scottish historian Alexander Tytler observed that “democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.” Now he tells us.