Thursday, August 4, 2011

Social media brick through window, torn from Facebook

Federal Budget 101

Here is a simple example that will clearly show you what all the nonsense and rhetoric is all about.

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:

U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.

Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Amount cut from the budget: $385

Still make sense? We hope so. We wouldn't want to do anything to take matters out of proportion, blow a situation our of context, bowdlerize, massage, manipulate, or misrepresent the spin on one of Uncle Sugar's latest success stories. (click here for minority report)

No doubt the floggings will continue until morale improves! Cum-bye-yah, Lord, Cum-bye-yah.

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