Let's start with a quick walk down federal budget memory lane.  

It used to be that getting a copy of the president’s budget as soon as possible after it was released was a painful, multi-step, difficult, and time-consuming process. 

First, I had to make sure I was on the list to pick up the (depending on the year) five to seven books (2000 or so pages) at the Government Printing Office. Then I had to get myself to GPO early on the day the budget was released, get on line, wait for about an hour in what usually was cold weather, and then buy and haul the budget back to my office. It was expensive – $100 or more. Cabs were often difficult to find near GPO, the books were heavy and cumbersome, and I typically tried to look at a few tables on the way back to the office to get a head start on an already tough day that was going to get tougher.

Steve Moore wrote a column published by the Wall Street Journal yesterday that tried very hard to use the results of a recent Gallup poll to convince everyone a massive taxpayer revolt is close at hand.  There are two problems: He's misreading the poll and he's doesn't understand its implications.

Bruce fowarded to me a remarkable poll from Gallup.  He suggested that I, rather than he, was the right person to comment.  I am happy to oblige one of my bloggers-in-crime.

The poll shows that, on average, Americans today believe that 50 cents of every federal tax dollar is wasted. Gallup makes a big deal of the fact that this is an increase from 46 cents per dollar in 2001.

There's one problem: the poll never defines "waste."

Is it:

At the Economix blog, Catherine Rampell asks, "What defines pork?"  I'll give two of many possible examples.  First, a Representative might write this on her website as the second line of her bio:

She is a public servant who prides herself on delivering the goods and services of the federal government to her constituents.

This is the first time I've seen pork written into a Congressional mission statement.  Second, there are some places in the federal bureaucracy in which there are competitive processes for allocating money and non-competitive processes.  One place that I encounter in my day job is at FIPSE, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. 

If you go to the page that is open to every institution, the so-called comprehensive program, you find this statement:

Every other budget summit has been held when a deal had to be reached more or less immediately.  In all of those cases, a summit was needed because there was some type of budget stalemate between Democrats and Republicans, the House and Senate, or Congress and the White House (or all of those) and there was a great deal of pressure on everyone in the room to come to some agreement.  The stalemate, and therefore, the summit, usually occurred late in the budget process.

But none of these things are the case now and that means that the Obama budget summit being held at the White House on Monday is going to be very different than the ones we’ve had before.  The differences:

•    There is no need to reach a budget deal this year.  Deficit reduction is not the appropriate fiscal policy in the current economic environment and few are seriously suggesting that the summit needs to produce an agreement.  In other words, we don’t actually need the summit to do anything.

•    This summit is happening at the start of the budget process rather than towards the end.

•    There’s no stalemate that has to be resolved.

Duh!

TO: The Next Director of the Office of Management and Budget

First, congratulations.

Second, you are and will continue to be in the hot seat.  Because of that, you will have to be one of the most visible OMB directors in U.S. history.  Many of the decisions you will have to make will require a great deal of support and very high public credibility.  Therefore, building that credibility must be one of your personal highest priorities.  If you wait for a crisis to occur before establishing that confidence, you will end up being defined by that crisis and will lose your ability to convince others in the administration, Congress, the media, and the public that they should listen to what you say.

Third, we don't know about the what the economy will look like on Inauguation Day.  As they have been doing for quite some time, the current economic problems likely will have morphed at least once into something else by then.  But the one thing we do know is that the federal budget situation will be far worse than perhaps any incoming president and Congress have ever faced.

Greg Mankiw directs us to David Leonhardt's article on John McCain's chief economic advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin.  I've known Doug for a number of years and admired his scholarship and his policy work.  It's got to be frustrating to be pushing the McCain economic agenda.  From the article, here's the crux of the problem:

In all, federal taxes now equal about 19 percent of the nation’s economic output, which is in line with the historical average. But the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, on their current path, would require that number to rise to an unmanageable 30 percent, and beyond, in coming decades.

“We as a nation cannot tax our way out of this problem,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin says. “It’s just not an option.”

Glenn Hubbard's and John Cogan's Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning seems persuasive until you consider that their premise is wrong, their math is misleading, and they fail to explain the real reason federal revenues have risen as a share of gross domestic product over the past 25 years.

First the wrong premise -- Hardly anyone is proposing to allow the 2001 and 2003 marginal tax rate cuts, marriage penalty relief, or child tax credit to expire in 2010. Senators Obama and Clinton have repeatedly promised to extend those tax cuts for all but the very wealthy. Senator Clinton defined wealthy as those making over $250,000 a year.

Second, Hubbard and Cogan examine only the past 25 years, starting in fiscal year 1983, when President Reagan's tax cuts first took full effect, driving federal revenues down to 17.5% of GDP from 19.6% when he took office in 1981.

Stan doesn't think his "Fiscal Fitness" column was choreographed to coincide with the Hubbard/Cogan op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal.  But a smart guy like Stan can always rely on a ready foil on the WSJ editorial page.

I object to many parts of the op-ed, but two in particular.