Categories
National politics

Budget Math

I wish I knew where they got their deficit spending number, but KVNU’s For The People really caught my attention with the side-by-side listing of the deficit spending in the budget President Bush just signed. They claim that $240 Billion of the $555 Billion is deficit spending. That’s over 43% of the total budget being paid with imaginary cash. The original excuse for deficit spending (back in the Depression era) was that it could be used to fund emergencies, as a temporary measure to get us past tough times such as war or depression. The problem here is that no matter how great the emergency, if you are spending everything you earn plus another 76% of what you are bringing in it’s time to find a way to reduce your costs by 40% (which would still leave us with deficit spending this year of $20 Billion).

What really got me about all of this is that although we are in a war right now that war only accounts for $70 Billion so we could remove that spending completely and we would still have $170B out of the $485B being paid on promises. (That’s still 35% deficit spending.) There was $28B in domestic spending that the President didn’t want (only $142B to go) and $10B in pork earmarks. In other words, nobody even attempted to spend less than 30% of the budget with play money. If Congress had started with the budget proposed by the President and simply subtracted everything they didn’t like we would still have been spending more than $100 Billion dollars that we didn’t have. I think we can say that this government is numerically bankrupt – who cares that they exercised their power to raise their credit limit so as to prevent them from being financially bankrupt this year.

By David

David is the father of 8 children. When he's not busy with that full time occupation he works as a technology professional. He enjoys discussing big issues with informed people, cooking, gardening, vexillology (flag design), and tinkering.