Federal Government Spent 8 Times Revenue in March

[Dont Tase Me Bro]

How can anybody not have an issue with this? No business or household could survive this way. How can anyone think the government will?


During the month, according to the Treasury, the federal government grossed $194 billion in tax revenue and paid out $65.898 billion in tax refunds (including $62.011 to individuals and $3.887 to businesses) thus netting $128.179 billion in tax revenue for March.

At the same time, the Treasury paid out a total of $1.1187 trillion. When the $65.898 billion in tax refunds is deducted from that, the Treasury paid a net of $1.0528 trillion in federal expenses for March.

That $1.0528 trillion in spending for March equaled 8.2 times the $128.179 in net federal tax revenue for the month.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/march-madness-feds-spent-more-eight-time

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

I think the figures presented here are wildly inaccurate. Basically what the Christian Science Monitor is saying is that $1 trillion in deficit spending was spent in March alone. Can any sane person believe that?

Presumably, most people who post on a political forum watch the news every single day. Can anyone honestly expect that $1 trillion in deficit spending can have been conducted in a single month and not raise angry cries from the right and the left? Have we heard any of those angry cries? So the story doesn't even pass the smell test.

Then let's look at some of the numbers that are linked to in the link:

On Table III C it says that the "total public debt outstanding" for the fiscal year is $13.5 trillion. By "this month" the figure increases to $14.19 trillion. So first of all, that's a difference in $700 billion, not a trillion. Second, we are in the 4th month of the year, so that $700 billion probably gets cut into four pieces to account for monthly deficit spending at less than $200 billion, not $1 trillion.

Again, let's also apply another common sense test. The stimulus was less than $1 trillion. The total cost of Obama's health care plan (which was paid for by cuts to corporate subsidies and efficiency increases) was $1 trillion. According to the Christian Science Monitor article, all of this spending was crammed into a single month. Aside from the fact that this has apparently snuck by the entire media and both political parties, how do you actually spend that much money in one month? You'd have to crash a thousand B-2 bombers into the ground and then re-build them. That's what it means to spend $1 trillion in one month. The story appears to be BS.