We're all doomed. Doomed! DOOMED!!!
Posted on 11/11/2005 1:00:58 PM PST by RWR8189
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The October budget deficit was a smaller-than-expected $47.2 billion, down from $57.3 billion in October 2004, due to strong receipts, a Treasury Department report showed Thursday.
Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting a $55 billion budget gap. The Congressional Budget Office last week estimated the deficit at about $50 billion.
October receipts were $149 billion, the highest since $157 billion in October 2001, the Treasury Department said in its monthly statement. Outlays were $197 billion, the highest since $205 billion in the same month in 2003.
The budget deficit for all of fiscal 2005 came in at a slightly revised $318.5 billion, down from $412.8 billion the year before, but still the third biggest deficit on record.
The White House in July forecast a $341 billion budget deficit in fiscal 2006, which ends next September.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
So what's the plan to pay the money back?
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
It's truly amazing that the government can borrow endlessly with absolutely no plan to pay back the money borrowed (and in the meantime lose 10% of its income to interest payments alone). I wish I could do that.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
You or I would be spending 20 years in a federal prison if we ran our finances like the feds do theirs. But at some point we are going to have to pay the piper. Does it make sense to wait until the problem is so bad we cannot ignore it further?
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Oh I almost forgot-- since your federal reserve notes aren't worth anything either, you can donate them to a 'recycling' project I'm starting up.
Don't bother to thank me, I want to do it. It's just the kind of guy I am.
Cute sarcasm. But seriously, do you think it's a good idea to have 10% of yearly revenues devoted entirely to paying off debts? Also, what do you think will be done with the debt? Will it simply grow forever, or will there be an effort to pay it off? Will we inflate our way to debt reduction? If it was such a good idea to borrow from the future to pay today's bills, why didn't we do that back in the early days of the republic? If that money is "free", then what's to stop us from borrowing 10 times as much? 100 times?
woohoo! Only $318 billion!! And they're projecting it will only be $341 billion next year! Oh, wait - that's after raiding Social Security surpluses... without those the deficit would have been more like $494 billion this year and $530 billion next year! At that 7.3% rate of increase, we can hit a cool $1 trillion within 10 years!
What do you say, lets go for it! :) With a little hard work and perseverance, we can get a few more of these fiscally conservative republicans in office to make sure we get there!
Good trend. All the whiners here will be out---course, they "didn't believe" that Clinton had a surplus, so they are never satisfied.
If everyone followed Hamilton's plan, the "sinking fund," Washington would always have a very small debt that could not be raised until it paid off the last debt.
Are we supposed to rejoice that the DEFICIT is "only $47.2 billion" under a Republican administration?
We'd all be furious if this happened under a Rat gov't.
The feds are not running their finances. They are running your finances.
You got it right when you said we will have to pay the piper.
Our elected officials are destroying this nation.
Government (and corporate, for that matter) finance is radically different than personal finance.
I strongly recommend that everyone read Niall Fergueson's "The Cash Nexus."
In any case, the problem here isn't so much that the government is running a deficit - it's what it's spending on.
Most of us borrow in large amounts. But (I'm in the banking business) there's good borrowing and bad borrowing.
Good Borrowing = Borrowing to buy a house, get an education, a necessary operation, a car, or invest in a business.
Bad Borrowing = Borrowing to go out clubbing all night, borrowing to go on vacation, etc.
The same applies to government.
Good Borrowing = Borrowing to buy Aircraft Carriers, build roads, build schools, etc.
Bad Borrowing = Borrowing to give money away to people.
We're all doomed. Doomed! DOOMED!!!
Wow, only $47.2 billion for one month. That's practically nothing. GWB and the federal government are so responsible when it comes to other people's money. /bushbot
You can borrow for as long as your income is decent and growing and your loans mature before you die. The govt. has good income that usually increases every year and does not die. That is why you need to pay loans back before you die. Since the govt. is not dying anytime soon, it can continue to borrow.
The thing about dying is that you don't need your assets after that, and thus anything you have when you die can pay off any outstanding debt. So even a person who maintains debt until death has an effective plan to pay back the money. On an ongoing basis it is always cheaper to spend money you have than to spend borrowed money; since the government can be assumed to be perpetually in the ongoing state, it follows that money spent servicing debt is pure waste. In the context of the Cold War there was a survival justification (borrow-spending helped to push the USSR over the edge), but there is no similar justification today, at least not for the things they are actually spending the money on.
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