This week's budget contains some important myth-busting about Australia's mining boom, the biggest since the gold rush days. It contains some extraordinary numbers.

Did you know, for example, that the resource sector has an investment pipeline of $450 billion in the coming years? That's about a third of the total value of Australia's entire annual economic output.

Fair share ... "The mining tax will add about $3billion a year to the budget bottom line. This helps, but miners will still be paying slightly less than their share." Credit:Phil Hearne

And while mining accounts for just 9 per cent of economic output, Treasury puts the combined output of mining and mining-related sectors at between 15 and 20 per cent. And get this: this resource and resource-related part of the economy is forecast to grow an average of nearly 9 per cent a year over the next two years. To put that in context, that is faster than Treasury's growth forecast for the booming Chinese economy, which is 8 per cent.

By contrast, the rest of the economy is expected to grow at a below-trend rate of just 2 per cent. Not a recession, mind you, but on par with growth forecasts for the US economy. One foot in the furnace and one foot in an ice-bucket, as economists have observed.