Interactive view of the US federal budget

I mentioned in passing in a post last week that most Americans suffer from a certain type of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the federal budget (and by extension, our deficit and debt)--essentially, we humans are just very bad at visualizing really big numbers. Hence this video, which I also shared in last week's post.

For those of us who think that we can solve our budgetary woes simply by "trimming the fat", the New York Times is here to help, with an interactive view of President Obama's 2012 budget proposal. The green rectangles indicate increases from 2010, while the red rectangles indicate cuts from the 2010 budget. Notice that the majority of the red spaces are small, where the majority of the green spaces are quite large.

The graphic isn't embeddable, so you'll have to click on this link to play around with it. Personally, the more time I spend perusing the graphic, the more hopeless it all starts to seem.

You can't balance a budget by going out to dinner less often but also buying a bigger house--that's essentially what this budget is trying to do. Most Americans--and apparently politicians, too--seem to think that we can solve our deficit problems by making our smaller programs more efficient, while letting our bigger programs (Medicare, Defense, and ahem, interest on our debt) grow ever larger. That's a losing proposition, akin to bailing out a sinking ship using a leaky bucket.

The only way we will ever be able to balance our budget is by hacking away at the big green rectangles--that's simple mathematics, because you better believe we aren't balancing it through tax increases. It won't be easy or fun, but we literally don't have a choice.

[New York Times]