It all depends on how you count. The U.S. Treasury recently announced a budget deficit of $163 billion for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2007. But how did they determine that amount?
They only looked at the change in their checking account balance. They ignored their bills or how much they owed retirees, including federal employees and our seniors.
If these bills were included the deficit would be trillions of dollars.**
This would be like you calculating your household budget only considering your checkbook balance, forgetting your bills, your credit card balances and your mortgage.
It all depends on how you count.
**Unfortunately, Treasury has not told us what their bills are yet, so we can't determine the true deficit number now. For FYE Sept. 30, 2006 Treasury told us the budget deficit was $248 billion, but once they told us the balances of their bills and how they owed retirees, we calculated the true deficit to be more than 16 times that number, $4,571 billion. That's $4.571 TRILLION. This means your share of our national debt went up by $14,000 in one year. At that point your share of our national debt was more than $176,000.
Comments