Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in his 1991 intro to the President Bush's original budget proposal:
" It contains almost 190,000 accounts. At the rate of one per minute, 8 hrs per day, it would take over a year to reflect upon these."
As if there needed to be further impediments to reading the Budget, because it isn't finalized during the congressional debate to OK it, there are only a few copies of it, that must be circulated amongst the Congressmen (in 1991 a copy weighed 24 lbs so it wasn't passed around easily
).
Since, historically and statistically, the budget gets bigger each year, its even more impossible to read the whole thing than it was in 1991.
Finally, the "official" passed Budget means nothing. The Feds have a neat and brazen trick called "off-budget spending". This includes Federal credit subsidies to gov't sponsored things such as Farm Credit Banks, Fed Home Loan Mortgage Corp, the US Postal Service. Also off budget are Social Security tax payments...so we don't see how our retirement contributions are being flushed down the same toilet as the rest of federal revenues.
And there are more fancy accounting tricks such as "current services baseline".
So, Ed, you asked if there is anything that will hurt us. Yes!
