You thought you’d had enough of depressing numbers after the stimulus package passed in February. But a reporter from the Heritage Foundation, out this week, shows that those numbers were just a fraction — about one-fifth, to be precise — of what the federal government will spend in 2009.

This year’s $4 trillion total — a record, even accounting for inflation — may look like a sudden blip on Heritage’s graphs, but research shows the spike is here to stay. Three years from now, when stimulus spending has slowed to a dribble, new programs and strained entitlements will bring federal expenses right back to today’s “emergency spending” levels. By 2019, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid caseloads will have hit record heights, and the national debt will be nearly double what it is now.

In the haze of zeros, it’s hard to really grasp what this means. It isn’t helped by the fact that the Office of Management and Budget has some 2,200 pages of documents explaining the budget.

But with the help of Heritage, we broke down exactly what $4 trillion means — both for spending and for each of us.