Ever wonder how the Federal Budget compared to a family budget?
Federal Budget:
* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000
Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,71
* Total budget cuts so far: $385
Adjusted to median family income:
* Annual family income: $50,502.00
* Money the family spent: $88,902.14
* New debt on the credit card: $38,400.14
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $332,126.29
* Total budget cuts so far: $896.00
This video breaks down the Federal Budget into major components that can be easily understood. In a nut shell, mandatory entitlement spending and interest on the Federal debt are larger in 2012 than total tax revenues. That means if we closed every government department and office, fired every government employee, disbanded our military and ended all discretionary spending, we would still have a small deficit. What would it take to balance the budget? We could raise taxes by 50% or cut entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by 60%. Do you see any of those things happening? Is it just a question of time before we go the way of Greece?
The CBO has estimated President Obama's budget plans will generate $10 trillion in new deficits over the next decade. I realize $1.44 million may not seem like a lot to Congressmen or Washington bureaucrats, but this is real money out here in fly-over country. In the current budget climate, it is absurd to spend this kind of money on a project that is irrelevant to ordinary Americans. CNS News reported:
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has so far awarded $1.44 million in federal funds to a project that, among other things, is estimating the size of the population and examining the “social milieu” of male prostitutes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
“In Study 1, formative ethnography will be used to describe the settings, venues, and overall social milieu in which male sex work is being situated,” says the NIH abstract for the grant. “In Study 2, we will conduct a Capture-Recapture Survey to estimate the size of the male sex worker population in each city.”...
