This past week, President Obama introduced his budget for fiscal year 2010. He proposes federal spending of just over $3.5 trillion. Unfortunately, the dollars he expects the government to bring in add up to just under $2.4 trillion, leaving a deficit of just under $1.2 trillion.

Let’s break those numbers down.

Under the new budget:

• The government will spend about $34,700 per U.S. family.
• The government will collect about $23,300 per U.S. family.
• The national debt will increase about $11,400 per U.S. family.

The current national debt of just under $10.9 trillion works out to about $111,500 per U.S. family, so we’re talking about increasing the national debt by about 10% in just one year. That’s a lot.

If you’re the kind of person who pays off your credit card bills in full, you actually don’t. You have over $110,000 in debt by virtue of being a citizen of the United States. And it will be over $120,000 by the end of the coming fiscal year.

If you’re interested in following all this, stayed tuned to this blog.

But here’s the process:

Fiscal year 2010 for the federal government begins on October 1, 2009. The introduction of the president’s budget is the first step in the process that determines where the money will go. Next, the House and Senate are each supposed to produce a budget resolution, setting their own spending priorities. Those are supposed to be reconciled into a final budget resolution.

Based on that resolution, the appropriations subcommittees in the House and Senate are each supposed to produce bills for the full committees, which are supposed to pass them out for debate on the House and Senate floors. When House and Senate bills are passed, they are supposed to go to a conference to resolve differences among the two houses. Then, a final, identical version of each appropriations bill is supposed to go back for a final vote in the House and Senate, and on to the president for his signature. (More detail on all this is here.)

Those last two paragraphs had so many “supposed to”s in them because Congress has fallen out of the habit of using these regular procedures for making spending decisions. Instead, they’ve been collapsing all spending into one or two big bills. From October to now, most government spending has been based on an “omnibus” bill, and this past week, the House passed another omnibus (just under $4,200 per family) to take care of spending for the rest of this fiscal year (2009).

These abbreviated processes unfortunately prevent the public from having a good idea of what is in them, which is bad. WashingtonWatch.com recently signed on to a letter asking congressional leadership to stick to regular order in the spending process. We’ll see what happens.