Supersized stats stretch past XLIV

Happy Super Sunday.

OK, so our long economic losing streak casts an unhappy shadow on this unofficial national holiday.

So do hand-wringing Super party poopers who cite our football fixation as incriminating evidence of alarmingly warped priorities.

So more Americans can name who will start at quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts tonight than can name who represents them in Congress.

So what?

The Super Bowl is educational. For instance, it gives us an annual Roman Numeral review.

This year's lesson:

XLIV means 44.

Extending that review:

I (1): The number of times the New Orleans Saints have made it to the Super Bowl, counting tonight's XLIVth edition in Miami.

VIII (8): The number of times the Dallas Cowboys have made it to the Super Bowl -- more than any other team.

XIII (13): The number of games the Saints won in a row to start this season before losing at their Superdome home to the Cowboys.

Now for a primer on federal fiscal folly threatening to sack us into future financial ruin: To fully comprehend the enormity of this challenge, you must get this equation:

1 trillion = 1 million million.

To better understand that equation, get this one:

1 billion = 1 thousand million.

Now get this: Six days ago, President Obama proposed a record $3.8 trillion federal budget with a projected record $1.6 trillion deficit.

Lowering that way down to a household-budget perspective:

If a family bringing in $58,000 indulged itself in the same percentage of deficit largesse as Obama's plan contains, it would spend $100,000.

Washington will do what it always does by printing enough money to cover its 42 percent gap.

If you print an extra 42 grand, however, you'll probably do time.

At least our politicians, including Obama, are starting to pay lip service to deficit reduction as the $12.36 trillion (again, that's $12.36 million million) national debt -- and our debt-service tab -- soar. The president aims to save about $3.4 billion by grounding NASA's plan for new manned (and womanned?) missions to the moon.

Too bad $3.4 billion is chump change on the colossal federal-spending scale. Too bad our biggest red-ink gusher flows not from space flight, bridges to nowhere, congressional pensions or wars.

It flows from the undeniably unsustainable growth of federal entitlements.

Last June, Medicare and Social Security trustees warned in their annual report that the systems' combined unfunded liabilities had surpassed $106 trillion. That startling stat will climb again in this year's report.

Still, most Democrats, including Obama, persist in proposing what amounts to "Medicare for all."

Republicans talk a much tougher entitlement-reform game. But they're predictably muted on the actual plays they would call to win it.

That's because any realistic entitlement-reform game plan must be based on a) increasing how much money those systems take in and b) decreasing how much money they pay out.

Got any ideas?

Here's one:

Time out on this bottom-line gloom and doom.

After all, this is a special American day when all Americans (non-football fans, too) are entitled to take a break from counting the Nanny State's accelerating -- and potentially catastrophic -- costs.

Instead, we can count penalties, turnovers, burgers, hot dogs, wings, nachos and assorted beverages.

So enjoy Super Bowl XLIV, which will produce compelling numbers all its own. And after the Saints go marching in to a glorious upset victory tonight, start looking forward to Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium, the gargantuan yet glitzy home of "America's Team."

Some petty nitpickers condemn that grandiose arena, which opened this season, as a grotesque monument to Lone Star State (and American) excess.

But hey, it only cost $1.15 thousand million.

Frank Wooten is assistant editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.