This is a lot of money, I wonder where it's at Options

[darksecret]

Toward the end of Clinton's first year in office: 09/30/1993 $4,411,488,883,139.38

8 years later: 09/29/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86

Toward the end of Bush's first year in office: 09/28/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06

Current: 08/19/2005 $7,926,125,407,102.74

From the Bureau of the Public Debt.

This post has been edited by darksecret: Aug 23, 2005 - 11:05 AM

[celicaST]

numbers speak for themselves

bodget overview

nasa's budget by the way is hardly a factor

by the way, a national deficit is not necessarily a unfortunate thing. deficit spending can and has been used to stimulate economic growth in the past.

taken from wikipedia:

"Following John Maynard Keynes, many economists recommend deficit spending in order to moderate or end a recession, especially a severe one. When the economy has high unemployment, an increase in government purchases create a market for business output, creating income and encouraging increases in consumer spending, which creates further increases in the demand for business output. (This is the multiplier effect). This raises the real gross domestic product (GDP) and the employment of labor, all else constant lowering the unemployment rate. (The connection between demand for GDP and unemployment is called Okun's Law.) Cutting personal taxes and/or raising transfer payments can have similar expansionary effects, though most economists would say that such policies have weaker effects on aggregate demand. On the other hand, if supply-side (non-Keynesian) effects are brought into consideration, which method has a better stimulative economic effect is a matter of debate."