Crunched by The Numbers

Billion, Trillion, Schmillion. It All Adds Up to a Big Negative

As you may have heard, the latest White House proposal for the federal budget amounts to a bazillion gazillion dollars, give or take a jillion. The great news is that, according to White House calculations, the budget deficit has been cut in half, a feat achieved primarily by running up the deficit to such grotesque levels that the halving of it is like drinking too much and then passing out.

The president boasts that the budget will be running a surplus by 2012, though this hypothetical surplus is based on such things as the sudden outbreak of World Peace.

What's true, however, is that the projected federal deficit of $239 billion for the 2008 fiscal year is considered so low compared with the recent horrifying budget deficits that officials are high-fiving one another over their fiscal restraint.

"It becomes like Monopoly money," says new Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, the former state auditor of Missouri, who has been eyeballing how the government spends money. "It's not real."

The federal government will spend nearly $3 trillion this year, which is about a trillion dollars more than when George W. Bush took office. The United States is a big, rich country, with a central government that is arguably the most powerful secular institution ever to exist on this planet -- a government that makes the Roman Empire look like a bowling league.

But anyone who looks closely at the budget quickly gets a scrunched-up brow. The "mandatory" portion of the budget, the entitlement programs, is surging. Health care is a grave concern. Baby boomers are reaching retirement and they're all going to want new hips.

We must do something, the president says. We must do something, the congresspersons declare. We must do something, the actuaries insist. But this involves discomfort, disappointment, recriminations. Fewer benefits or more taxes. The political leaders stand at the edge of a very cold pool. You go first, they tell one another. No, you.

President Bill Clinton left office with the budget in the black, and in December 2000, the Congressional Budget Office projected a 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. Recession, war, the Bush tax cuts and an earmark-crazy Congress made that anticipated surplus go poof.

And so today, even with a strong economy and increased tax revenue pouring into the Treasury, we run deficits, and borrow money, and subsidize our operations by pilfering all the money in the Social Security trust fund.

The general public struggles to remember the difference between the annual deficit and the overall federal debt, and perhaps that's a good thing, since the national debt is a number so horrific it comes close to being the literally fatal number once dreamed up by Ian Frazier in a story in the New Yorker: a killion.

Including what we owe to ourselves for our many years of spending the Social Security money that we were pretending to save, the debt stands at approximately $8,821,053,163,042.

It's a testament to the vigor of the American economy and the hard work of so many hundreds of millions of people that nearly $9 trillion of debt is not considered crippling. Indeed, there are people who say that, looked at a certain way -- as a percentage of our entire economy -- it's not really that much money.