NewMexiKen

Source of income for FY 2006:

• Income taxes $967 billion
• Payroll taxes $819 billion
• Corporate income taxes $200 billion
• Excise taxes, gift taxes, etc. $172 billion
• Our children and grandchildren (borrowed) $390 billion

Over at Albloggerque Jon Knudsen talks of how million and billion soon lose their meaning. He notes, “If a person counted one number per second, it would take about 11 days to count to one million. It would take 33 years to count to one billion.”

NewMexiKen likes this analogy. If you spent $10,000 a day, you could spend a million dollars in 100 days. It would take you almost 274 years to spend a billion dollars.

From an editorial Monday in The Washington Post:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the archivist job is about ensuring that fading documents behind thick glass are adequately protected from the elements. As important as that is, the position involves far more. The archivist oversees and — in the best of worlds, facilitates, promotes and prods — the release of far less musty government documents, material essential to understanding modern American history. In an age when the amount and type of information are proliferating, the archivist decides what information must be preserved and ultimately made public and how best to make it accessible.

For example, at the dawn of the e-mail age, the archivist had to determine whether an administration’s e-mail messages were government records that had to be maintained for posterity; luckily for historians and the public, it was eventually required that they be saved. The next archivist will inherit a similar question about videoconference tapes and transcripts.

The History News Network has the latest on the nomination of Allen Weinstein to be Archivist of the United States.

On the eve of Monday’s Senate committee vote recommending his nomination as Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein’s reputation and character were called into question by people who lured him two decades ago to run a high-profile institute in California. In 1984 Weinstein was appointed to revive the fortunes of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Eight months later he left in a cloud of doubts about his management abilities, according to a press account at the time.
…

The largest organization for which Weinstein has been responsible had an annual budget of between $6 to $8 million and a staff of several dozen, he told HNN. The National Archives has a budget of more than $300 million and a staff of some 3,000 scattered across the country. Weinstein is confident he can successfully manage the Archives. He told senators in his response to written questions, “it is important to recognize that the Archivist of the United States does not ‘manage alone,’ to paraphrase the popular book title, but [i]s the head of a talented and experienced leadership team…. I do not view the administrative responsibilities as Archivist as more daunting than the ‘small business’ model from which I have drawn most of my experience.”

“While Mr. Bush last week acknowledged that private accounts, by themselves, wouldn’t help Social Security’s long-term financial outlook, now the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary has informed the White House that its plan would hasten to 2012 from 2018 the date when Social Security will begin taking in less in payroll-tax revenues than it is paying out in benefits.”

— Wall Street Journal quoted by Atrios

From Daily Howler:

BUSH (2/4/05): Yes, ma’am.

QUESTION: What will be the cost of the transition from the way Social Security is now to the way you’re proposing to do it?

BUSH: Yes, she’s asking about the cost of the transition. Estimated at about $600 billion over a ten-year period of time to get the personal accounts started on the—the way we’ve suggested they grow. It’s a good question.

“It’s a good question,” Bush told the young woman—and then he basically lied in her face, offering a baldly bogus reply to her seminal question. In fact, the transition to private accounts would cost trillions of dollars, over the course of the next several decades—perhaps $15 trillion in all, the Congressional Budget Office has said (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/2/05). This Sunday, even Cheney acknowledged, on Fox News Sunday, that transition costs would run in the trillions.

From Eric Alterman:

“The era of big government is back.” Previous to this year, George W. Bush increased the size of the federal budget by 27 percent, if I’m not mistaken, busting a budget that had been in surplus when he inherited it and making him the biggest of big government spenders since Lyndon Johnson. Within that context, he has still managed to cut—or is trying to, almost all payments going to the most vulnerable members of society, children, students, the poor, the working poor and even (particularly) veterans (and here), while vastly increasing the amount given to the very rich and to the military. Five years ago Bush told us he was something different; a “compassionate conservative.” We now know he is neither compassionate, nor by any imaginable definition an economic conservative. Rather he is merely dishonest; effectively so, perhaps, but no less dishonest for being so.

The Denver Post, of all people, criticizes the Bush budget — Budget a blueprint for fiscal fantasy.

The $2.57 trillion budget that President Bush sent to Congress yesterday will draw fire from deficit hawks who see that it doesn’t give a realistic picture of what the government will spend in the upcoming fiscal year.

For example, the military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t enter into the balance sheet.

The Post concludes:

As a result of those cuts, U.S. tax revenue will fall to 17 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 21 percent in 2000 and the lowest in four decades.

If the president and Congress continue insist on making those tax cuts permanent, the sea of red ink will continue rising.