and people will have a better chance of understanding them. Felix Salmon makes that point today.
One thing which might help would be a cost-per-household measure. (As well as a hyperlink to the primary source.) In 2009, the figures now have total tax revenues of $2.157 trillion and total expenditures of $3,998 trillion, for a total deficit of $1.841 trillion. In real money, assuming 114 million households in the US, that means the average household will pay about $19,000 in taxes this year, but that the government will spend about $35,000 per household; the difference of $16,000 per household will have to be put on the national credit card.
In my last post, I broke the numbers down to per-capita, but he has the same idea. There are ways to explain things to make them easier to understand, and if someone avoids that, I would question their motives.
UPDATE - another advocate of the per-person/per-household accounting.