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HOLY COW!!, now that is a a lot of cashola, it boggles the mind!. I guess their using "billions" as their new pocket change now.
Posted with the usual disclaimers.
http://finance.sympatico.msn.ca/investing/news/businessnews/article.aspx?cp-documentid=6160314
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/080204/K020408AU.html
What's in a trillion? A look at the number in Bush's $3 trillion budget
Published: Monday, February 4, 2008 | 5:22 PM ET
Canadian Press: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -
A person given $1 million a year to spend would need three million years to blow $3 trillion. The United States, a government of sizable financial appetite, can do it in one.
Three trillion dollars is about what the U.S. federal government will spend this year for domestic and defence programs and benefit entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, according to President George W. Bush's latest federal budget proposal Monday.
A trillion is a figure more commonly used when talking about outer space. A light year, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a year, is about 9.6 trillion kilometres.
Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That's a million times one million, or a thousand times one billion.
There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if the U.S. government's budget was divided up. If the money was split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.
Counting to three trillion at a rate of one number a second would take almost 95,000 years.
Looking at it another way, one would have to circumnavigate the globe 120 million times to travel three trillion miles - or 4.8 trillion kilometres. Similarly, that would be some 17,000 round trips to the sun. The universe, 15 billion years old at the outside, would need another 200 such lifetimes to reach three trillion years.
Posted with the usual disclaimers.
http://finance.sympatico.msn.ca/investing/news/businessnews/article.aspx?cp-documentid=6160314
Bush sends Congress $3.1 trillion budget, big increases for defence
Martin Crutsinger, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 04, 2008
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration unveiled a massive $3.1-trillion budget Monday with soaring deficits.
Main features of the proposed spending plan call for sizable increases in military spending while protecting President George W. Bush's signature tax cuts.
It shows the U.S. government spending at $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history.
Despite the increases, most government programs outside of national security face a squeeze.
Among other things, the budget seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs - Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.
Even with those savings, Bush projects that deficits, which have been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.
Bush's final full budget is for the 2009 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. It proposes spending $3.1 trillion, up six per cent from projected spending of $2.9 trillion in the current budget year.
Part of the deficit increase this year and next reflects the cost of a $145-billion stimulus package of tax refunds for individuals and tax cuts for business investment that Bush is urging Congress to pass quickly to try to combat a threatened recession.
Bush projects that the deficit will decline rapidly starting in 2010 and will achieve a modest surplus in 2012.
But Democrats said that forecast was based on flawed math that only included $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and no money after that.
It also failed to include any provisions after this year for keeping the alternative minimum tax, originally aimed at the wealthy, from ensnaring millions of middle-class taxpayers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that fixing the AMT in 2012 would cost $118 billion, more than double the surplus Bush is projecting for that year.
Even some Republicans faulted what they say as Bush budget's sleight of hand.
"They've obviously played an inordinate number of games to try to make it look better," Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the top Republican on the budget committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"Let's face it. This budget is done with the understanding that nobody's going to be taking a long, hard look at it," Gregg said.
Bush's spending blueprint sets the stage for what will probably be epic battles in the president's last year in office, as both parties seek to gain advantages with voters heading into the November elections.
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/080204/K020408AU.html
What's in a trillion? A look at the number in Bush's $3 trillion budget
Published: Monday, February 4, 2008 | 5:22 PM ET
Canadian Press: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -
A person given $1 million a year to spend would need three million years to blow $3 trillion. The United States, a government of sizable financial appetite, can do it in one.
Three trillion dollars is about what the U.S. federal government will spend this year for domestic and defence programs and benefit entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, according to President George W. Bush's latest federal budget proposal Monday.
A trillion is a figure more commonly used when talking about outer space. A light year, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a year, is about 9.6 trillion kilometres.
Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That's a million times one million, or a thousand times one billion.
There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if the U.S. government's budget was divided up. If the money was split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.
Counting to three trillion at a rate of one number a second would take almost 95,000 years.
Looking at it another way, one would have to circumnavigate the globe 120 million times to travel three trillion miles - or 4.8 trillion kilometres. Similarly, that would be some 17,000 round trips to the sun. The universe, 15 billion years old at the outside, would need another 200 such lifetimes to reach three trillion years.