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Crunched by The Numbers
White House budget director Rob Portman recently unveiled a proposed 2008 budget of nearly $3 trillion.
(Dennis Brack -- Bloomberg News)
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Eight trillion 800 billion and change.
Is that a lot? You might want to think about it, since you owe it.
To the Chinese, among others.
THE FEDERAL BUDGET IS FUNDAMENTALLY A DULL AND TEDIOUS SUBJECT, like topsoil erosion, only not as glitzy. The national debt in its wildest fantasies wishes it could be as sexy as global warming. When you meet a "deficit hawk," he or she is usually a nerdy type from one of those sensible flyover states where everyone has plenty of tubers stored in the root cellar.
Like Kent Conrad. He's a Democratic senator from one of the Dakotas, and chairs the Budget Committee. The other day a reporter accosted him in a Capitol stairwell and asked him why the federal government chronically spends more than it receives in taxes.
"It's because it is politically much more popular to be for every tax cut and every spending program. That's what this president has done. It takes a while for the folly of this fiscal policy to be revealed," Conrad said. "The only thing that fixes it is our political will. And the citizenry rising up to tell our elected representatives to stop this."
But the citizenry does not rise. The citizenry has other things on its mind. There's a war going on. There are huge sporting events and Grammys and Oscars and celebrities mating inappropriately and breaking up promiscuously. Hel- lo: Anna Nicole Smith died. The budget exists outside our normal frame of reference. Humans don't actually live from fiscal year to fiscal year; the very concept of a fiscal year has a Parallel Earth quality to it.
We spend money $20 at a time and can't grasp a million, much less a billion or trillion.
Conservatives can celebrate the fact that discretionary federal government spending has, in fact, dropped as a percentage of our overall economy. But entitlement spending has made up for it. In 1979, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, federal outlays were 20.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In 2006, they were 20.3 percent. You'd think there was a constitutional requirement that the federal government represent a fifth of the national economy.
