From Marketwatch:

The U.S. is on track to post a record budget deficit in 2009, the White House is expected to announce Monday, according to reports.

The federal deficit will jump to almost $490 billion in the next fiscal year, U.S. media said, citing White House officials. Meanwhile, this year’s deficit will swell to more than $410 billion, a White House budget update to be released Monday afternoon will show.

The White House is scheduled to release its mid-session budget review at 1:45 p.m. EDT.

The continuing economic slowdown and bills for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are behind the record deficit.

The U.S.’s biggest budget deficit to date was $413 billion, according to figures cited by USA Today. President Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion when he entered office in 2001.

An adviser to Republican presidential contender John McCain told the Washington Post that the new surge of red ink won’t have implications going forward since it’s tied to cyclical developments like the slowing economy and economic stimulus checks.

From the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - A new nationwide campaign is warning Americans that unless the federal government puts its financial house in order, the country could be bankrupt in a generation.

The project, organized by Peter G. Peterson, an investment banker who served as commerce secretary in the Nixon administration, and David M. Walker, the former comptroller general of the United States, aims to build grass-roots support for wholesale changes to the federal budget - though the overhaul would require middle- and upper-income Americans to give up some cherished government benefits.

Peterson and Walker said yesterday that the campaign, sponsored by the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation in New York, will kick off next week with a documentary called “I.O.U.S.A,” the first salvo in an aggressive, multimillion dollar effort that will include television advertisements and Internet outreach.

Peterson, the foundation president, and Walker, the chief executive, said the widening gap between government revenues and spending will eventually destroy the confidence in the American economy that has led international lenders to continue to finance the national debt.

“We are going to get a crisis like most Americans have never seen,” Walker said during a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor.

The national debt is now more than $9 trillion.

See the link for the rest of the article. Peterson’s group also puts out a color brochure titled, The State of the Union’s Finances.