As I've been writing about the deficits, one of the things that occurs to me is that conservative and liberal policy analysts are really talking past each other on this issue, because they're talking about different sorts of deficits. Liberals are focusing on the cyclical deficit, which is not a big problem. Conservatives are talking about the structural deficit, which is a huge problem. And so one side says, "the deficit is a problem," and the other side says, "the deficit is manageable," and both sides are both right and wrong.
Cyclical deficits are the kind of deficit you run when you lose your job: you've had a temporary income shock, and so you're going to be spending more than you take in. In the case of government this is actually a good thing -- "automatic fiscal stabilizers" like welfare, unemployment insurance, and food stamps keep recessions from being as bad as they used to get. (I know you think this recession is bad, but trust me, in neither absolute misery, nor the size of the relative decline, does it even approach the convulsions of the Great Depression, or several of the 19th century "panics".)
Even if you think the government shouldn't be doing stimulus spending, cyclical deficits just aren't that much of a problem. We have a recession on the order of this one about once every thirty years, which turns even a $1.3 trillion dollar deficit into a manageable $43 billion per year, or less than $200 per person. Given the misery that would obtain if we slashed outlays to meet intake, or raised taxes, that's not a terribly bad sum for what you might think of as Great Depression insurance. Plus the debt's going to be eaten away by inflation, so it will cost even less than that in real terms.