Word: budgetable
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...White House and the Congressional Budget Office will both release their financial budget estimates on Aug. 25 and there's good news and bad 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...
...hard for many Americans to believe, but the United States' checkbook hasn't always been in the red. Aside from periods of war or economic turmoil, the federal budget was actually in surplus for most of the nation's first 200 years. The government incurred considerable debt during the Civil War and the Spanish-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...
...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...
...that doesn't mean that deficits are good, either. The U.S. covers the shortfall by issuing more government bonds, which can drive up interest rates and lead to inflation. Deficits also make it harder for a financially strapped government to deal with unexpected disasters. In fact, the last U.S. budget surplus occurred in 2001, when Washington was able to use fiscal and monetary policies to cushion the fallout following 9/11 and keep the economy from tumbling into a recession...
...mattress just yet. After all, the $9 trillion figure is just an estimate, and who knows what the economy will look like in 10 years. With any luck we won't be in a recession anymore, so revenue will be up and stimulus spending will disappear. The real budget problems lie in the long-term programs, such as Medicare and Social Security: Medicare's 2003 prescription-drug program has added nearly $1 trillion to the deficit and baby boomers' looming retirement will stress Social Security's already financially precarious situation. It's one thing to spend...