President Barack Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have cost you one month of your life this year -- already.

No, they haven't passed their European-style government control of your health care and trimmed costs by denying or delaying health care to the old or infirm; that is yet to come.

Obama, Reid and Pelosi have committed enough taxpayer money so that, on average, Americans will work until Aug. 12 this year to simply pay the costs of government spending plus government regulations.

Last year, Americans worked until July 16 to pay off the total costs of federal, state and local government. This year, courtesy of the stimulus spending, the Pelosi/Reid increased federal budget, the bank and auto company bailouts and the cash you paid for other people's clunkers, the cost of government has increased by 26 days -- almost a full month of the year. This year, federal spending will consume 30.36 percent of the nation's income, translating into 111 days of your life this year. State and local spending takes up 49 days, and regulatory costs, 65 days.

You may be familiar with Tax Freedom Day -- the day until which you must work to pay all taxes. This day fell on April 13 this year, but because it only measures this year's tax burden, it doesn't take into account the costs of regulation and the costs of government spending.

The true cost of government is total government spending plus the costs of regulations that the government forces you to pay for in every product and service you buy.

The cheerleaders for ever-increasing government control want us to focus on the federal deficit. Thanks to all Obama's spending, it has now reached over $1.5 trillion, expected to reach over $1 trillion again next year.

They have a solution: Raise taxes on all Americans to "close the deficit." Raising taxes doesn't reduce spending; it facilitates future higher rates of spending. The only way to reduce the cost of government is to have the government spend less and reduce the costs imposed by regulation.

And what are we getting for all these increases in the size, cost and intrusiveness of the federal government? The stimulus package promised to create 3 million jobs, yet in the five full months since the "stimulus" was passed, 2.2 million jobs have been lost.

Remember the purpose of the "stimulus:" Obama, Reid and Pelosi said if we took $700 billion or so from people who earned it in taxes or debt and gave it to other people chosen by the Democratic congressmen, we would all get rich and create jobs. Imagine that Reid, Pelosi and Obama stood at one end of a lake and dipped their buckets in the lake, filling them to the brim. The trio then walked around to the other side of the lake, and, holding a press conference with television cameras, poured the same three buckets of water back into the lake and announced they were stimulating the lake to greater depths.

Obama's theory is doing this 700 billion times will make the lake deeper. If that works, then the stimulus spending will create jobs and wealth. Sadly, all this spending is making us poorer and worse off. Our government at work.

As a comparison, the last time the cost of government was this late in the year was during the Jimmy Carter doldrums of 1977. Inflation, higher taxes, unemployment, reduced standards of living and eventually Ronald Reagan followed.

Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.