Crunched by The Numbers

BUDGET SEASON MORE OR LESS STARTS THE FIRST MONDAY IN FEBRUARY, when the president submits his budget to Congress. Congressional opponents announce that the budget is "dead on arrival." It's like Groundhog Day, an invariant ritual.

Then there are hearings, dozens of them. The standard hearing involves politicians trying to get administration officials to admit that the president's budget is a pack of lies. The next step is for Congress to produce, by April 15, the budget resolution, which sets the dollar constraints for 19 separate budget functions.

Then the various committees work on appropriations bills -- perhaps you could say that the Spending Season has begun -- which are due to be passed and sent to the president for his signature by Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year. But the process always drags on, deep into fall, sometimes into winter, nudging its way into the next Budget Season. It's a 365-day process, and it's never entirely clear who's in charge. As Norquist puts it, "Everybody touched the ball, nobody touched it last."

The hard copy of the president's budget comes in four volumes, the real star of which is the Appendix. It's 1,237 pages, with tiny type and two columns per page.

This is where you learn about obscure budget items such as the Helium Fund, the Rural Electrification and Telecommunications Liquidating Account, the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance ($200,000 to "to revitalize the commemoration of Memorial Day") and the United States Institute of Peace (shouldn't its employees work harder?).

It's important to keep the millions and billions straight. In the millions category, we see that we spent, in '06, $8 million for a food-stamp program in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is very little compared with, say, the $1.421 billion spent by the Army in '06 on a program whose primary function is to destroy the Army's stockpile of chemical weapons.

THE CASUAL OBSERVER, POPPING IN TO HEAR EXPERTS DISCUSS how the government accounts for itself, would be forgiven for thinking that the government is essentially a vast criminal enterprise -- that it's Enron, only much bigger.

A more generous take would be that the government is so large that it's very difficult for anyone to keep track of where all the money goes or spend it sensibly. Lobbyists know how to get an earmark in the middle of the night when no one's looking. Thus millions might get splurged on a "Bridge to Nowhere" in remote Alaska even as, for example, outpatient war veterans at Walter Reed live in squalor.

Both parties vow to cut down on waste. The White House hit list of programs includes NASA's Red Planet Venture Capital Fund and the Education Department's Exchanges With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program.

Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, meanwhile, cites contractors dumping 50,000 pounds of nails in the Iraqi desert because they were too short and immolating a new truck because it had a flat tire (an Iraq war veteran testified in Congress that "one of the civilian trucks got a flat tire and they did not have the proper wrench to change the tire so the decision was made to torch the truck").

The scariest person when it comes to the budget is David Walker, the comptroller general at the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. "We face a tsunami of entitlement spending that could swamp the ship of state," he says.

Consider, he says, Medicare's newly added prescription-drug benefit. We'd have to have $8 trillion right now, invested in Treasury bonds, to cover the gap between what we've promised in that program and what we expect to receive in premiums over the next 75 years, by his calculation. The Social Security gap is $6.4 trillion, he says, and the total Medicare gap is $32 trillion. Overall "unfunded commitments" of the government total about $50 trillion, Walker says.

He gives President Bush credit for floating some ideas during his State of the Union address that would cut some of the long-term Medicare funding gap. The proposal received a cool reception from congressional Democrats. They'd rather focus on waste, fraud and the Bush tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.

The first boomers retire next Jan. 1. The Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, last week warned of a "fiscal crisis," saying federal debt could rise from 37 percent to 100 percent of GDP. And then could keep rising "exponentially."

Big numbers are everywhere. Scary percentages. Hairy trends.

"If you take that $50 trillion," says Walker, "that's $440,000 per household."

And they won't accept Monopoly money.