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So much money,
so little understanding

IN the 1993 political fantasy "Dave," Karl Rove-types recruit a guy off the street to stand in for their president after the leader of the free world has a debilitating stroke during in a sexual episode with a woman who is not the first lady.

The movie has a number of good moments, though the plot is extremely improbable. Maybe not so much the part about the impersonation -- in my most cynical flashes, I could see that happening -- and the part about the sex -- which we all know actually happened.

One unlikely aspect would be that someone who looked so much like the president would not have cashed in greedily on nature's aberrational bounty, hitting the talk show or daytime TV circuits long before the real deal had even recited the "protect-the-Constitution" bit on Inauguration Day.

Most implausible, however, is the climactic scene in which the fake president, Dave, attempts to restore funds for a children's reading program that the real commander in chief cut.

Dave calls in an accountant friend, corrals the members of his cabinet, flips through their budgets to find wasteful and impractical measures and transfers the money pegged for those to pay for the children's project.

I'm not saying a president wouldn't want to save a worthwhile enterprise like children's literacy. What is fantastic is that the secretaries of agriculture, labor, commerce, energy or whatever would be so informed about each program in their departments that they could explain its purpose and pass judgment on its value. Even more unbelievable is that someone in government would know how much money gets spent by which agency and under what circumstances.

I don't sense that anyone does and it may be near impossible.

There's the sheer enormity of the number. The president -- the real, non-cinematic one -- Monday proposed a $2.57 trillion budget for next year. That's $2,570,000,000,000, not including the cost of the war in Iraq. War bucks are kind of added on bit by bit, $25 billion here, $81 billion there.

The breakdown of the budget plan broadly notes discretionary spending and mandatory spending, interest payments and deficit tabs, but there are a zillion other components like tax credits, aid, grants, subsidies and incentives.

Members of Congress freely admit that none of them ever get around to reading each line of budget proposals, much less truly comprehend how money is expended.

I wonder who the heck totes up the bills and writes the checks. I imagine there are clusters of gray government workers, security tags looped around their necks, toiling away in the cubicled depths of unadorned office buildings, wielding calculators and No. 2 pencils in the vain attempt.

Who's to know when lots of money goes missing or falls through the cracks? That's why big government contractors get away with so much. That's why the Army is going ahead with paying Halliburton Co. $9.3 billion despite the fact that it can't account for a whole bunch of work it said it did in Iraq and Kuwait.

In any case, budgets aren't so much about the dollars and cents than the policies they pursue. Bush's budget layout launches months of bickering and dickering as Congress and the president shift, trim and add money to shape America as best as money can to reflect their ideology.

If past practice holds, most of the 13 separate budget measures will be rolled into a giant bill that will allow politicians to slip in pork projects and outrageous provisions like the one last year that opened citizens' tax returns to a few chosen members of Congress.

The process is not intentionally designed to make your eyes glaze over, but the net effect is the same, unless you don't let it.

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