Budget Debacle In Plain English

         Wow!  Put in terms we all can digest and understand.  Incredible.

To Put It All In Perspective ....

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:

• U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
• Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.

• Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
• Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
• Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Amount cut from the budget: $385

Whew! I'm glad they got that all worked out to our benefit, aren't you?  I feel better already.

Political Poop!!

Why is Madoff in jail and Barney Frank still running free?  Wasn't Frank and his buddy Dodd that got all the special (shouldn't have been allowed) loans through?  Do politicians have political immunity?  They must since the ethics committee just gave Rangle a slap on the hand.  Did they even give Frank a slap on the hand? Since the problem goes back to him, maybe we could all send him the half of our house payment that is upside down and he could pay it out of all his kickbacks and bonuses????  I know we couldn't hold him to it, but wouldn't it just be fun to have HIM get a bunch of threatening/scarry mail? Ah well, fun to think about anyway.