It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s Tim Geithner, and he wants to save our AAA rating from the same fate that could befall the UK:

Ratings agency S&P has lowered its rating on the UK to “negative” from “stable”…. “We have revised the outlook on the U.K. to negative due to our view that, even assuming additional fiscal tightening, the net general government debt burden could approach 100 percent of gross domestic product and remain near that level in the medium term,” S&P analysts led by David Beers in London, said in a report today.

Every time I took a look at anything news-related this weekend, it inevitably had PIMCO’s Bill Gross on it, blithering about how this threat to the UK’s triple-A rating was a threat to the US rating as well, and how we’d lose that status soon enough. Geithner isn’t ready to let that happen, though, by jove:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner committed to cutting the budget deficit as concern about deteriorating U.S. creditworthiness deepened, and ascribed a sell-off in Treasuries to prospects for an economic recovery.

“It’s very important that this Congress and this president put in place policies that will bring those deficits down to a sustainable level over the medium term,” Geithner said in an interview with Bloomberg Television yesterday. He added that the target is reducing the gap to about 3 percent of gross domestic product, from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

It’s “critically important” to bring down the American deficit, Geithner said.

In its latest budget request, the administration said it expects the deficit to drop to 8.5 percent of GDP next year, then to 6 percent in 2011. Ultimately, it forecasts deficits that fluctuate between 2.7 percent and 3.4 percent between 2012 and 2019.

Everything I’ve read recently, including CBO’s estimates for the first half of this year, suggests the government’s gross receipts are at astonishingly low levels, and it’s hard to see that getting any better this year, so that explains the lovely 2009 numbers. I realize the deficit numbers for 2012-2019 roughly keep pace with inflation targets, thus rendering them “not all that bad” in lollerdollars, but should we be thrilled that he’s happy to add to the deficit pile every year for the next 10 years?

I’ll be back in the office Tuesday (whee!) and my brain is fighting, desperately, to stay on vacation. The TBI piece I linked about the UK made me think of Little Britain, so that is what I am watching right now on Youtube. Enjoy: