Word: billion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...showed that the IOU is getting bigger. Two-thirds of all students now leave college with outstanding loans; the average amount of debt rose to $23,200 in 2008. In the last academic year, the total amount loaned to students increased about 18% from the previous year, to $81 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Education...
...five years before becoming eligible to collect benefits. But because the CBO evaluates the costs of legislation - like the Senate reform bill - based on 10-year periods, the CLASS Act - which would begin collecting premiums in 2011 but wouldn't begin payouts until 2016 - appears to generate $72.5 billion in savings between 2010 and 2019. On paper, these savings are used to offset spending in the bill, which even CLASS Act supporters admit has the appearance of budget gimmickry...
...CNPC deal, Iraq's first international oil contract in nearly four decades. The British and Chinese companies won the right to drill for 20 years in what is believed to be one of the world's four largest fields with potential reserves of about 65 billion barrels. Though it will earn only $2 a barrel, BP says it aims to keep expenses down by using low-cost Chinese labor and equipment. The group promised Iraq's government that it will nearly triple the field's output from 1 million barrels a day to about 2.8 million barrels...
...barrels in 1979, when Saddam boosted production to finance his calamitous war with neighboring Iran. A government adviser recently told Britain's Independent newspaper that only about one-third of the 1,400 wells in southern Iraq are functioning. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrastani estimates it will cost about $50 billion to upgrade infrastructure needed to produce Iraq's target of 6 million barrels a day by 2017. "Iraq's oil industry is in a dire state," says Samuel Ciszuk, Middle East energy analyst for the consultancy firm IHS Global Insight in London. "Decades of war, brain drain, political instability...
Feinstein also argues that Zuma is wildly inappropriate for the task he has set himself. Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 in protest at his party's open hostility toward his investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms deal. Through his financial adviser, who was jailed in 2005 for fraud, Zuma was one of the beneficiaries of kickbacks worth thousands of dollars. With Mbeki and Zuma slugging it out at the time, the courts and the state prosecutors became their arena, at considerable cost to the judiciary's independence. Prosecutors finally dropped the case in April, two weeks...