Starting Thursday, officials from government ministries and agencies will line up in the hallway outside the Finance Ministry Budget Bureau to make their annual pitches for hunks of the 2006 general account budget.

Each year, the pie for public services shrinks.

This is partly because of the mammoth public debt, which will require 20.50 trillion yen in fiscal 2006 to redeem and pay interest on outstanding Japanese government bonds, up 2.05 trillion yen from this fiscal year's initial budget.