President-elect Barack Obama forecast Tuesday trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, arguing the government must spend enormous sums of money to rescue the tanking economy.

“We’re already looking at a trillion-dollar budget deficit or close to a trillion-dollar budget deficit,” Obama told reporters at a meeting with his economic team.

“Potentially we’ve got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on at this point.”

The federal deficit stood at $455 billion when the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30.

Obama wants to pump at least $775 billion into the economy in the form of a two-year stimulus spending plan.

His economic rescue package will include a $300 billion middle-class tax cut and comes on top of the $800 billion bailout plans for the ailing finance and banking industries and the Big Three automakers.

‘We’re going to be investing an extraordinary amount of money to jump-start our economy, save or create three million new jobs, mostly in the private sector, and lay a solid foundation for future growth,” Obama said.

The President-elect again put Congress on notice he won’t tolerate a stimulus bill that includes pork-barrel earmarks for projects like the notorious bridge to nowhere.

Ignoring climbing unemployment, slumping housing and retail sales and a gridlocked credit market, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky urged Congress to proceed slowly on the stimulus bill.

“We should encourage, not discourage questions about this bill in a reckless rush to meet an arbitrary deadline,” McConnell said in a statement.

Despite Obama’s stark warning – his second in two days about the fragile state of the economy – the stock market stayed on the upside.