“Unless we deal with entitlements in a serious way, the problems we have with this year’s deficit and next year’s deficit pale in comparison to what we’re going to be seeing 10 or 15 years or 20 years down the road. Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem.”

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The words are President Barack Obama’s, spoken during last week’s press conference.

Here, they are taken out of context.

The president was responding to a question about lack of bipartisanship in the economic stimulus legislation then making its way through Congress. He used the fact that so many federal dollars are “pre-spent” for Medicare, Social Security, debt payments and a bevy of other programs before they even arrive in the federal treasury as a side comment, merely an illustration.

It piqued few people.

That’s a problem.

What the federal government calls entitlements, the Mississippi Legislature calls built-ins.

For both treasuries, fixed obligations have been building up like magma under a volcano. No one knows when they will blow, but when they do it’s going to make today’s economy look like a Sunday school picnic and a trillion dollars look like chump change.

Here’s a comparison: Take a young family with a certain, fairly fixed amount of income every month. Under what has been the norm for generations, checks are written for rent or mortgage payments, car notes, student loans, credit card debt, utilities and garbage collection. They are the family’s built-ins. Some families include their tithe as expenses that must be met before spending a nickel on anything else can be considered.

Other spending — food, fuel, clothes — is essential, but can be tinkered with. The first priority is to pay for housing, transportation and all other “set” costs.

Congress and the Legislature work much the same, but the difference — and it’s a major one — is that they have not kept their entitlement or built-in expenses constant.

Their situation is more akin to a family that signed on for a balloon note on their house or an adjustable rate mortgage or agreed to some kind of weird car note that increases over time.

Mississippi says, by law, that it will provide health care or nursing home payments to people who fit certain criteria. The Legislature has no real control over the number who meet the criteria, so it’s no surprise when the state’s share of Medicaid expenses, which has also fallen one time in recent years, trends up.

During the 1990s, the state took on unprecedented “credit card” debt. The amount owed is being reduced, but bondholders must be paid before a penny is spent on anything else, including education.

Congress is far more notorious for open-ended obligations, with Social Security as the prime example. Today’s dollars are paying today’s retirees.

And a boatload of baby boomers is approaching pension time. Medicare is almost as big and is growing by billions each year. Debt payments will also increase after the bailout and stimulus spending. Congress already borrows more every year to keep up with obligations, but, as Obama also said last week, the day impends when America’s credit is maxed out.

Want to hear an amazing number? Back in August before the economic crash the nation is now confronting matured, a film was released on the topic of government debt. “I.O.U.S.A.” was billed as being to federal spending as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was to the environment. It pegged the national deficit, then officially $9.6 trillion, as more accurately at $53 trillion if unfunded entitlement obligations were included.

The film wasn’t a box-office smash. No waddling penguins or polar bears in peril. Just numbers.

It’s good news, though, that Obama has officially joined all those in positions of authority who recognize that entitlements are the public treasury’s Mount St. Helens.

When he mentioned it last week, it was in the context that if and when serious efforts are ever undertaken to avoid an absolute disaster it will have to be done because it’s the responsible thing to do, as opposed to the Democrat or Republican thing to do.

Legislators in Jackson and members of Congress have, to date, shown a stronger inclination to think and act in the short term, often defined as the number of days until the next election. Even as members of the U.S. House and Senate act on a series of stimulus and relief bills with the extreme urgency they insist is necessary, the coming emergency is ignored.

Perhaps that’s only natural.

But we’d all be better off if they’d realize that the longer the magma is allowed to build, the greater the explosion.

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Charlie Mitchell is executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS 39182, or e-mail cmitchell@vicksburgpost.com.