NSA $52 Billion Black Budget, A Sense of Magnitudes

By: Steve_H_Hanke

On October 28th, I wrote a blog post, “The NSA’s Rent is Too Damn High,” in which I looked at the $52.6 billion price tag for America’s spook infrastructure – the so-called “black budget.” When allocated across every American taxpayer, this staggering sum comes out to $574 per taxpayer, per year.

But, there are other edifying ways of gaining perspective on such a whopping amount of money. Doing so is important. Indeed, according to John Maynard Keynes’ biographer, Lord Skidelsky, Keynes believed that a good economist must always have “a sense of magnitudes.”

We can get a sense of magnitudes by looking at this year’s black budget as a portion of the major sources of the federal government’s revenues. The table below tells that tale:

By Steve H. Hanke

www.cato.org/people/hanke.html

Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Prof. Hanke is also a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.; a Distinguished Professor at the Universitas Pelita Harapan in Jakarta, Indonesia; a Senior Advisor at the Renmin University of China’s International Monetary Research Institute in Beijing; a Special Counselor to the Center for Financial Stability in New York; a member of the National Bank of Kuwait’s International Advisory Board (chaired by Sir John Major); a member of the Financial Advisory Council of the United Arab Emirates; and a contributing editor at Globe Asia Magazine.

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