x Your Money
x christine romans


Set Clip Length:

and passing them into law, but instead of paying for them immediately, they give the treasury the power to borrow money to pay the bills. virtually used nowhere else in the world. last year the u.s. government spent $3.8 trillion. two-thirds of that roughly came from revenue. that's mostly taxes, $2.5 trillion. rest was a shortfall. we had to boar reit. $1. 3 trillion. that is the deficit. you take the sum total of those annual deficits and enter oast on them and that creates the national debt which right now is about 16.4 and change trillion dollars. now, the u.s. treasury is empowered to borrow money to make up the shortfall between revenue and expenses, the deficit. but only up to a certain limit. that's the debt ceiling. treasury does not make decisions about how the money is spent. they are simply empowered in this case to write the checks to pay the bills that are already incurred by your democratically elected congress. now that we've hit the debt limit, exceeded it a little bit, the treasury has two options. they can fiddle around with $200 billion the way you would if you're a

Excerpts 0 to 1 of about 2 results.

(Some duplicates have been removed)

Terms of Use (10 Mar 2001)