Pricey government prize

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President Bush has released his fourth budget to Congress, requesting $2.34 trillion of spending for fiscal 2005. I have often maintained one of the biggest problems with Washington is no one can tell the difference between $1 million and $1 billion.

When Congress starts counting our tax dollars in the trillions of dollars, it is like a trip to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. One trillion dollars, is a million million dollars. That's a lot of money, no matter how you stack it.

The president will predictably boast this is a lean budget that spends money judiciously on top national priorities like homeland security and not a penny more. He will try to assure conservatives this budget limits the growth of federal nondefense, nonsecurity spending (social programs) to less than 2 percent. His Democratic rivals will complain this is a penny-pinching budget that underfunds education, health care, the environment, etc., etc.

They are both wrong. A federal budget that will spend more money in a single year than the entire GDP of France and 3 times what it cost to fight World War II can hardly be disparaged as inadequate or celebrated as tightfisted. Uncle Sam Inc. will spend more money in just this year than it spent combined from 1787-1900 -- even after adjusting for inflation.

Ironically enough, we are now celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Newt Gingrich's bold declaration that "we Republicans will make government smaller and smarter." It didn't exactly turn out that way, given that the budget is now nearly $1 trillion larger than when the Republican revolution was launched.

The truth is that in recent decades, neither political party has been a particularly good steward of taxpayer resources. Government ingests about 4 times to 5 times more of America's national output today than in 1900. The government's share of everything we produce and earn has about doubled since the end of World War II.

Or here's another way to think about it: If you took all the spending by government and just evenly divided it among all families of four in America, each family would be more than $50,000 richer. This is double the level of spending in 1960 and 14 times the amount government spent in 1900, even after adjusting for inflation.

So the question American taxpayers should ask is: Does my family really get anywhere near $50,000 worth of services every year from city hall, state governments and Uncle Sam Inc.?

The composition of government spending has changed too. Even with the recent increases in the military budget in the new age of terrorism, a smaller share of federal spending is devoted to national defense -- ironically, the one area of the budget where Congress has a clear constitutional authority to spend money -- than at just about any other time in U.S. history. Traditionally, about one-third to one-quarter of all federal expenditures were for national security. Now that percentage is down to less than one-fifth.