The most harmful lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Our country will be in trouble until both its citizens and its leaders stop engaging in willful self-delusion.

For the better part of 30 years, we have been digging ourselves into a fiscal hole by running large budget deficits at times when no credible economic theory supported doing so. Now, in the middle of the worst worldwide economic slowdown in 80 years, a majority of economists support some level of deficit spending, at least as a temporary necessary evil. But virtually none supports it over the long run.

The Obama administration and other Democrats, instead of proposing a credible plan for eventual fiscal balance, resort to unrealistic economic projections and the "asterisks" of unspecified future spending cuts that became common practice in the Reagan administration.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party tries cynically to don the mantle of fiscal rectitude, ignoring the fact that 74 percent of the debt was run up under the last three Republican presidents and that no Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower ever submitted a balanced budget to Congress.

Cynicism seeped from every pore of Obama's proclamation that his Cabinet had to cut $100 million from their budgets this year and his assertion that this would reduce the deficit over time. If you cut that much from spending every day it would take more than 40 years to reduce this year's projected deficit to zero.

Such manipulative acts harm the nation because they add to citizen self-delusion, further delaying meaningful action.

But it would be harder to find anything more saturated with willful self-delusion than the Tea Party protests held in many states April 15. The protesters think taxes are too high and condemn deficit spending.

What do they call for to fix the problem? They call for an end to congressional earmarks in appropriations bills. Good idea, but nearly as phony a response to structural deficits as Obama's $100 million cuts.

The Tea Party folks would have more credibility if they had chanted calls to abolish all farm subsidies and student aid and waved placards to repeal the Medicare drug benefit and to shrink the military.

What these protesters are unwilling to acknowledge is that if you don't cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending and federal highway construction funded by the gas tax and don't repudiate our contractual commitment to pay interest on the national debt, you could cut all other federal spending to near zero and we still would have a budget deficit.

You cannot close the deficit without raising taxes. Period.

Economist Edward Lotterman teaches and writes in St. Paul, Minn. Write him at ed@edlotterman.com.