Word: billion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Using detailed satellite imagery, scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre (WAC) found that on almost half of all farmed landscapes around the world, landowners are either sparing some existing trees or planting new ones, leading to what the study calls "significant" tree cover. In fact, on more than 1 billion hectares (2.5 billion acres) of farmland, which is twice the size of the Amazon, tree cover exceeds 10%. That's a huge increase from previous estimates, which were as low as 50,000 hectares. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...news. The good news is that the Obama Administration has scaled back its estimate of this year's budget deficit to an estimated $1.58 trillion (down from $1.84 trillion in May). The bad news is that this is by far the largest budget shortfall in U.S. history - nearly $900 billion more than last year's deficit - and it accounts for 11.2% of GDP, the largest percentage since 1945. It's more money than we have circulating in actual currency and if added to the national debt, it will raise the tally by 13%. (To understand debt vs. deficit, think...
...American War but paid it off by the early 1900s. Between 1901 and 1916, the budget was almost always balanced. But then came the Great Depression followed closely by World War II, which resulted in a long succession of deficits that caused the federal debt to balloon from $16 billion in 1930 to $242 billion by 1946. (Adjusted for inflation, that's about $206 billion and $2.67 trillion, respectively...
...subsequent decades, running a surplus in the good years and a deficit in the bad ones, until the early 1980s. President Ronald Reagan's economic and foreign policies - tax cuts combined with substantial increases in Cold War-era defense spending - led to a string of deficits that averaged $206 billion a year between 1983 and 1992. The balanced-budget acts of 1990 and 1997 helped reverse this unprecedented level of peacetime spending, and in 1998 the U.S. recorded its first budget surplus in nearly 20 years...
This year's federal deficit is the result of declining revenue - people are making less money so they're paying less in taxes - and increased spending. So far, the government has spent $530 billion more this year than it did last year, a number that includes $169 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), $125 billion for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and $83 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that doesn't even account for the spending scheduled for next year. Add to this the projected $1 trillion price tag of Obama...