Last week’s release of the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term budget projections prompted the merest murmur of concern. That’s America’s fiscal problem in a nutshell: It greets detailed and impeccably nonpartisan projections of looming financial catastrophe with a shrug. Tell us something we didn’t know. We’re busy right now.

Yes, projections are just projections, and most prophesies of doom turn out to be false. The CBO discusses its own forecasting record and underlines the uncertainties. As it explains, if a few big things go well — faster-than-expected growth, lower-than-expected interest rates, the right kind of changes in policy — a fiscal emergency might never happen. But the apathetic consensus ignores the equal risk that some or all of those things go worse than expected, making fiscal calamity unavoidable. Bad as the numbers are, they’re a central-case projection, neither optimistic nor pessimistic.

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