The final budget of the Obama Administration hits the street on Tuesday. It’s a week late and marks the sixth time out of eight budget submissions that the Administration has missed the legally mandated target. But whenever it comes out, you can bet we’re digging into it faster than ESPN commentators will analyze every play after Sunday’s big game.

In some ways, the budget is hard to get your head around, and it’s not just the several volumes. People think budgets are about numbers, but they are about priorities. What is funded at what level and what isn’t. Also, it is a powerful and potentially misleading document for every Administration. A President can propose any new pie-in-the-sky program that has no political chance or rosy new economic numbers that will make their future deficits less scary. President Bush’s budgets liked to project bigger deficits so they looked smaller when the actual numbers came in. And all Presidents propose policies that were roundly rejected by previous Congresses, in many cases by not just the opposition, but their own party!

Information is power. And until the moment they release the budget the only information the public and lawmakers have on the budget is what the Administration wants to tell you. Even the first budget document is light on details, mostly bragging about what they did or chastising Congress for not enacting proposals in previous budgets. But there are other volumes. The Appendix contains all the legislative proposals (even written in the form of legislation) and detailed funding information. The Historical Tables provides you budget numbers going back decades – budget deficits in constant dollars, as a percentage of GDP, historical funding levels for different agencies, a whole smorgasbord of data. Analytical Perspectives provides yet more data, mostly on proposals or program areas the administration wants to highlight, it also includes information on tax expenditures.

To really understand the budget, it’s important to track it for multiple years. Something that appears to be a new proposal may just be the same-old Congressional reject year after year. Or there may be a real but untouted change in policy where some item doesn’t get funded as much or something else gets a dramatic boost. Without the context of history it is hard to understand.

In the coming days, we’re likely to hear policy proposals trotted out. For instance, a $10 per barrel tax on oil was floated. Considering it got shot down almost immediately by the House Ways and Means (tax writing) Committee Chairman, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader, the highlight of the proposal’s existence is likely to be its appearance in the budget. The Secretary of Defense has already announced a four-fold increase to the so-called European Reassurance Initiative. Next year’s budget request for what we call “NATO-lite” will be $3.4 billion. We’re guessing this will be in the special war budget, the Overseas Contingency Operations (“OCO”) account, where it is conveniently off budget. There may also be proposed changes to Earned Income Tax Credit, which was highlighted in the State of the Union. Then there are perennials on the Cuts, Consolidations, and Savings list. Some of these were in the first Obama budget and are likely to still be there in the last.

All that said, you can be sure that Tuesday morning we will be fully recovered from our Superbowl food-comas and ready to receive the President’s last budgetary Hail Mary.