What is the Federal spending deficit?

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$ 318 billion

$ 760 billion *

 

$ 2.9 trillion in the late 1990s **

$ 1 to 3 trillions (includes social security and debts owed to medicare)

$ 8 trillion for the medicare prescription benefit alone (source: from Medicare Trustees)

Goal: "Accurately value these decisions ($3.5 trillion)*** we make" as a polity.

Dennis Cauchon, USA Today, August 2006.

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* Ever since Alexander Hamilton created federal debt to pay back the French, Dutch and Spanish who helped finance the colonial War for Independence against Great Britain, the use of bonds to pay today's costs with tomorrow's income has been a policy of national parties and politics.

 

1) How much?

A new budget calculator to help understand the context of government expenditures and expenses is at:

Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) –  CEPR Calculator.

* Audited report as opposed to the Congressional figures.

2) It is not the deficit stupid?

Interactive: Who’s Pulling the Strings?

October 11, 2013

by BillMoyers.com Staff

How can a small group of ten, influence the entire legislative machinery of the Congress?

The answer is that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision a well-funded network of conservative groups has arisen that has the ability to make the lives of Republicans who seek compromise very, very difficult.

  1. Edwin Meese
  2. James De Mint
  3. Virginia (Ginnie) Thomas
  4. David Bossie
  5. Chris Chocola
  6. Michael Needham

Find out more about the "dirty dozen" of contemporary paralytic politics. Click below:

http://billmoyers.com/category/what-matters-today/

Medical insurance cost calculator

market watchers

Bloomberg

MSNBC

CEPR: Center for Economic and Policy Research

 

Sources:

Bill Moyers: Who is Pulling the Strings?

Called accrual accounting, covers the future debts against the present.

** $6,700 per household is the accumulated debt.

*** In December ,2006, the Chinese government announced it held $1 trillion in US bonds or debt. That is due, in part, to the US being one of the largest importing nations in the world.

links

08/07/2006, October 13, 2013

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