How much is being spent....?

It is very hard to keep in perspective the amount of money being thrown around right now by our government....

From Lew Rockwell
It Would Be Cheaper to Fight World War II Again
by Robert Higgs

What is the right word to describe the U.S. government’s current and proposed fiscal condition: fantastic, unbelievable, surreal? The Obama administration now expects a budget deficit in fiscal year 2009 of $1,750 billion, or more than 12 percent of GDP. Total federal spending this year is expected to be $3,940 billion, or 27 percent of GDP. President Barack Obama promises that the deficit will be brought down to $1,170 billion in fiscal year 2010. Don’t bank on it.

Did anyone, even two or three years ago, expect this situation to develop? We need to go back only ten years, to fiscal year 1999, to reach a time when the government’s total outlays were smaller than this year’s deficit. Ay, mamacita, what’s going on here?

To get some perspective on how totally crazy the government has gone in its almost incredible overreaction to the financial and economic developments of the past year, consider that during World War II, which was paid for mainly by borrowing, the government ran deficits during the fiscal years 1941–46 that added about $191 billion to the national debt by the end of this period...