On October 28th, I wrote a blog post, “The NSA’s Rent Is Too Damn High,” in which I looked at the $52.6 billion price tag for America’s spook infrastructure – the so-called “black budget.” When allocated across every American taxpayer, this staggering sum comes out to $574 per taxpayer, per year.

But, there are other edifying ways of gaining perspective on such a whopping amount of money. Doing so is important. Indeed, according to John Maynard Keynes’ biographer, Lord Skidelsky, Keynes believed that a good economist must always have “a sense of magnitudes.”

We can get a sense of magnitudes by looking at this year’s black budget as a portion of the major sources of the federal government’s revenues. The table below tells that tale: