Updated at 2 p.m.

Bruce Bartlett, the economist and former Reagan administration official, has been pounding the drum to get people to be more realistic about taxes. His case, in short, is that taxes will have to go up to cover the cost of government that Americans want.

Referring to this week’s tea parties — the protests against taxes — Mr. Bartlett writes on Forbes.com:

First, many protesters implicitly assume that the deficit has increased solely as a result of Barack Obama’s policies. But in fact, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion this year back in January, before any of Obama’s policies had been enacted, and a cumulative deficit of $4.3 trillion through 2019. (CBO made no assumptions about what his policies might be in making its projection.) It’s true that projected deficits have gotten larger since January. But much of this resulted from deteriorating economic conditions that would have occurred even if John McCain were president. Moreover, it is absurd to assume that McCain would not have enacted any stimulus programs had he been elected… I strongly suspect that many of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even though it would have increased the deficit by about the same amount. Proof of this proposition is that there were no tea parties during the years when George W. Bush was turning the surpluses of the Clinton years into massive deficits. Indeed, if concerns about deficits are the primary motivation for this week’s tax protests, then these same people should have been holding demonstrations of support for Bill Clinton in 2000 when the federal government ran a budget surplus of 2.4% of the gross domestic product–equivalent to a surplus of $336 billion this year. The truth is that the greatest addition to national indebtedness occurred in 2003 when Bush rammed through the Republican Congress a massive expansion of Medicare to provide drug benefits even though the system was already broke…. People should remember that while they have the right to their opinion, they are not entitled to be taken seriously. That only comes from having credibility gained by the correct presentation of facts and analysis and a willingness to be even-handed–criticizing one’s own side when it is wrong and not only speaking up when the other party does the same thing.

Update: Mr. Bartlett wrote me an e-mail this afternoon, responding to some of the comments he’s received from readers: