This is as close as I’m going to get to being political, but I got to wondering if our 18th government shutdown meant that we were spending less money than we brought in (assuming the IRS would still operate to collect our taxes.)
So the first question is how much is the government spending during the shutdown? The estimated answer is that we have stopped about 17% of our spending. 83% of it is still trucking along unaffected. And secondly, how much of a deficit did we write into the 2013 budget? For that budget, we planned to bring in enough money to cover 76.3% of our spending.
Put those two facts together and you can see that even during this government shutdown, we are STILL spending more money than we collect.
And one final, somewhat-related thing before I return you to normal blog posts, KenC pointed me to a video that does a good job of putting all of these enormous numbers into perspective.
I’m sure people can take these numbers and use them to argue on either side of the aisle. That’s the beauty (and confusion) of our political system. But it’s helpful if we all start with the facts and go from there instead of starting with other people’s opinions that are screamed at us from the televisions.
Government Shutdown Still Doesn’t Balance The Budget
So the first question is how much is the government spending during the shutdown? The estimated answer is that we have stopped about 17% of our spending. 83% of it is still trucking along unaffected. And secondly, how much of a deficit did we write into the 2013 budget? For that budget, we planned to bring in enough money to cover 76.3% of our spending.
Put those two facts together and you can see that even during this government shutdown, we are STILL spending more money than we collect.
And one final, somewhat-related thing before I return you to normal blog posts, KenC pointed me to a video that does a good job of putting all of these enormous numbers into perspective.
I’m sure people can take these numbers and use them to argue on either side of the aisle. That’s the beauty (and confusion) of our political system. But it’s helpful if we all start with the facts and go from there instead of starting with other people’s opinions that are screamed at us from the televisions.