USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon is an expert at distilling complex data about governments down to bite-size pieces. Today he finds that:

Taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, a USA TODAY analysis found. That’s nearly $500,000 per household.

When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household. That is more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.

Kudos to USA Today for running such hard-data stories on the front page. Too many newspapers opt for the ”human interest” angle when reporting on government economic policy.

Cauchon’s data raises many questions. For one, how could governments have gotten away with imposing $62 trillion of unfunded obligations on young Americans?

At the state and local level, taxpayers have been sleeping as union-backed politicians have jacked-up compensation levels for the nation’s 16 million state and local workers. 

You don’t have to be a libertarian to be amazed at the way the government’s many tentacles often work at cross-purposes. The Wall Street Journal reports today on the U.S. milk industry:

Let me add to Sallie’s observations on the House farm bill battle. Inline graphic (sparkline): I watched the action on CSPAN over the pro-reform Kind/Flake amendment and was really struck by the arrogance of the anti-reform members. They repeatedly said essentially: “How dare members like Flake criticize the hard work of the Agriculture Committee — he’s not on the committee, he’s not a farmer, and so what does he know about farming!” The anti-reform members also trotted out the ”downtrodden small farmer” rhetoric, despite the frequent reminders from the reformers that the vast share of subsidies go to the largest and wealthiest farms.

Yesterday I blogged about a Washington Post column by Shankar Vedantam that began: “About 35 million Americans regularly go hungry each year, according to federal statistics.” I looked up the federal data, and the real number appears to be about 9 million.

I queried the Post about the discrepancy, and Shankar kindly pointed me to this study produced by academic health scholars and the Sodexho Foundation. (I appreciate the prompt replies by both Shankar and the Post’s ombudsman).

The Sodexho study is a classic example of program advocates apparently inflating the size of a problem in order to prompt “Congress to expand existing programs,” as it proposes. I am not a health specialist, but it seems to me that Sodexho using 35 million for the number of Americans going hungry is a huge exaggeration. 

On page 10 and 11 of the Sodexho study, the authors admit that they are including both those people who occasionally go hungry and those who are “food insecure,” which is a far larger group. As I noted yesterday, the USDA puts the narrower group (those sometimes going hungry) at only about 9 million people.

While the Sodexho authors admit that they are using the broader group, they do not tell readers how vastly narrower the actual hunger group is. (The table on page 11 only shows the broader measure).

Senator John McCain and other budget reformers are right to rail against the institutionized corruption of federal “earmarking.” Earmarks are, however, just a small part of the massive bloat in the federal budget. Earmark reform is needed, but presidential candidate McCain needs to propose more fundamental budget reforms in the coming months.

Representatives John Campbell (R-CA) and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) have just introduced an idea that McCain could champion: A constitutional cap on the overall federal budget. You can read the proposed amendment here, but essentially these House budget experts propose that annual federal spending growth should not exceed the long-run average growth in the U.S. economy, except with a two-thirds vote or a declared war.

I’ve proposed a similar budget cap that would be statutory, not constitutional, and thus easier to implement. See here and here.

Either way, the point for Mr. McCain (or Mr. Obama, if he is so inclined) is to promote some sort of overall cap on the budget to drive home that the government’s budget should not grow any faster than the average family’s budget.

Here are some notes on the federal budget released by the Bush administration today:

Here are some bullet points regarding the new federal budget to be released on Monday:

• The Bush administration will introduce yet another irresponsible federal budget, which this year features a huge $400 billion deficit and spending that tops $3 trillion. Amazingly, President Bush was also in office when federal spending topped $2 trillion (back in 2002).

• President Bush promises once again that the budget will be balanced sometime down the road, but he again uses phony accounting to make that claim. For one thing, he hasn’t accounted for future relief from the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which Congress will surely provide. Also, Bush has not included all the likely future Iraq war costs in his budget.

• To his credit, President Bush proposes some savings to Medicare and Medicaid, two of the largest and fastest growing federal programs.

One sure way to create an uprising against big government would be to sign up every American voter to Senator Tom Coburn’s daily email reports on pork spending. I should take news about pork in stride, but I can’t help myself. I get disgusted every time I read the Coburn blasts.

Today’s item that turned my stomach was from the Waterbury Republican American (Connecticut):

One sure way to create an uprising against big government would be to sign up every American voter to Senator Tom Coburn’s daily email reports on pork spending. I should take news about pork in stride, but I can’t help myself. I get disgusted every time I read the Coburn blasts.

Today’s item that turned my stomach was from the Waterbury Republican American (Connecticut):

One of the more enlightening disclosures from the legislature’s latest ethics eruption was the state spends about $10 million a year on the salaries and benefits of more than 50 agency administrators whose main function is to lobby lawmakers.

For taxpayers, this may be the costliest appropriation in the distended $16.3 billion state budget. It funds squads of unfettered lobbyists who wheedle and when necessary sleep with key legislators for ungodly sums of your tax dollars for dubious programs and projects. One reason state taxes are so high, state budget growth easily outstrips inflation every year and the state’s per-capita debt is among the highest in the nation is the government constantly lobbies itself to spend and borrow more.

The self-reinforcing or perpetual motion aspect of big government is one of the most disturbing aspects of federal subsidies, which I explore in this study.

I recently updated data I presented last year on the total number of federal subsidy programs.

It turns out that the federal government currently operates 1,776 subsidy programs. These include subsidies for states, cities, individuals, non-profit groups, and businesses.

As the chart shows, the number of subsidy programs has increased 25 percent since 2000. 

George W. Bush: He’s no Thomas Jefferson.