According to the House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus' Materials for Five-Minute Speeches on the Budget, released Tuesday, federal government spending on publicly held debt is $504 million every single day. What could we do with today's worth of interest expense alone, if we didn't owe it to our creditors? We could:

• hire 8,930 new airport security agents
• increase the solvency of Social Security by half a billion dollars
• give every college freshman $342 in tuition assistance
• provide full health care benefots to 71,479 more veterans

Columnist Allan Sloan has come out in favor of deficit figures that show the long-term consequences of our spend now-pay later fiscal policy. Today, on Marketplace: SCOTT JAGOW: We're less than two weeks from the end of the government's fiscal year and it looks like the federal budget deficit will come in about 20 percent smaller than last year, around $260 billion. Or it could be twice that amount if you do the math the way Newsweek's Allan Sloan does it. ALLAN SLOAN: $558 billion dollars, give or take a few buck for rounding errors.

CBO chief Donald Marron, a month ago : "[T]he message I would send is that we've gone from a period in which the fiscal deficits we were running in this country were large and not sustainable if they had persisted, to a situation in which, at least now and for next year, for several years going forward, deficits appear to be in a range that they're sustainable.”

Via Kevin Drum, we may now know why CBO found an unexpected drop in Medicare spending this year. Actual spending hasn't gone down. Rather, the Bush administration is waiting until next fiscal year to pay some of its bills from this year. That way, some of the spending on services performed this year will get counted in the FY07 budget. And when the CBO puts out its FY07 budget projection, there'll be no pesky election to worry about. Here's an excerpt from a great article on the scheme, from Barron's (sub. req'd).