on another, more important note:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news...by-the-numbers
some excerpts, but i recommend reading it all..
The debt debate, by the numbers
With congressional leaders at the White House on Thursday for another debt limit parley with President Obama, here are some basic numbers to keep the debate in perspective:
As of the end of the day Tuesday, the Treasury had a cash balance of $78 billion.
Last year at about the same point, Tuesday, July 6, 2010, it had a cash balance of $224 billion and a year earlier on July 6, 2009 it had a cash balance of $257 billion.
and:
There were reports Thursday that Obama would seek deficit reductions of $4 trillion. That was the approximate number recommended by the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission which the president appointed early last year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline projection, the cumulative deficits over the next ten years will be more than $6.7 trillion -- so a reduction of $4 trillion in future deficits would amount to nearly a 60 percent cut over that ten-year period.
and it ends as such:
According to the CBO estimate released last March, the government will collect $2.23 trillion in revenue in the current fiscal year – 13 percent less than in 2007.
This year federal spending will amount to about 24 percent of gross domestic product while revenues will be 14.8 percent of GDP.
When Obama said to his Wednesday Twitter town hall audience, “We actually now have the lowest tax rates since the 1950s,” he was incorrect.
Today’s highest personal income tax rate, 35 percent, exceeds the top rate in 1992: 31 percent.
But he would have been correct to say that revenues as a percentage of GDP are the lowest since 1950, when they were 14.4 percent of GDP.