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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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This enrages Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and the archenemy of Big Government. He says, "You can get people upset about $600 hammers, but not $2 trillion budgets."
Or $3 trillion. The sound bite needs updating.
EVEN IF THE BUDGET IS SO INNATELY DULL THAT IT CAN'T EVEN GET A NOD on the Sunday morning TV gabfests, it still has its small circle of aficionados, of number crunchers who know that the dead of winter is Budget Season in Washington.
At this very second, somewhere in town, men and women are examining tables filled with numbers, most of which, out of convenience or perhaps shame, have had the last six zeros deleted. When dealing with items like Social Security and Medicare and the Pentagon, you can get away with lopping off nine zeros. You know you've hit the big time when you can round to the nearest billion.
"Is it 2.9 or is it just over 2.8, Steve?" asked Rob Portman, director of the president's Office of Management and Budget, during a news conference last month unveiling the administration's 2008 budget.
"We'll give you 2.9," Portman concluded.
Trillion, he meant. He was rounding to the nearest $100 billion.
Funding for the war has been a particularly sketchy budgetary enterprise. That the 2008 budget finally mentions the war money (pages 44-45, "Prevailing in the Global War on Terror") is considered a breakthrough moment in budgetary "transparency."
So far, according to OMB, the government has spent $426.8 billion on the war, and the president is asking for another $235.1 billion to fund the war through the end of the 2008 fiscal year. OMB's five-year budget plan, the one that President Bush says will bring the budget back into a surplus, projects only $50 billion for the war in 2009, and no money at all in 2010, 2011 and 2012. It anticipates peace, in short. "This is our good-faith effort to be as transparent as possible in what we anticipate the needs will be, as far out as we can possibly and reasonably project," Portman said at his news conference.
