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. 

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.

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.