That said, I thought Matt's solution to this problem was not altogether satisfying:
Oftentimes when talking about budgetary matters in the United States, I think it would be helpful to come up with something other than raw dollar totals to discuss. Talking about a given initiative costing $X per person or per household, or being such-and-such a percent of total economic output, might give people a better understanding of the relative costs of different things.
Would it? If you take the size of the budget and divide by the number of households in the country, you will end up with the mean but not the median cost per household. The problem is that this would give people a better understanding of the cost only if we lived under a government that levied some wacky head tax -- a lump sum tax on every person, regardless of income -- rather than a country with a progressive income tax.
Maybe some futuristic high-tech version of the New York Times could automatically scale budget figures to your tax burden -- I'd subscribe to that -- but until then I fear we'll have to live with our imperfect brains and their imperfect command of the budget.
(The image above is supposed to look like someone standing next to $100 million dollars.)
Matt's point was not to create some metric that would indicate the tax burden of individual households or people; his intention was just to scale budget items back into the realm of what we can understand. The number used in the denominator is arbitrary (households, population, pecan trees in Georgia), as long as it results in numbers that are easier for comparison on a linear scale and doesn't cause us to shift our interpretations into the log scale.
We should say -- "you know your credit card balance -- the one you just can't pay because it's so huge? Well the government has a much bigger card in your name, and it's also maxed out. Sleep tight!"