OK, so now Drudge was recently also going off about the budget deficit. Many people are confused about the deficit vs. the public debt. Well it's this simple: Say from my post of yesterday you know you owe in debt $63k but you make $80k/yr. All well and good. That $63k is your debt, and is the equivalent of our gov't debt in my "essay" of yesterday.

Now the "federal deficit" is the amount the fed. govt is overspending for any given year. So if you are making $80k and you actually have a budget, that budget would be a plan for spending more than $80k/yr. (If you are servicing $63k in debt, well, that'd be understandable, wouldn't it?) That is pretty much what we are doing here.

Wikipedia discusses the 2009 US Federal Budget here. For 2009, $2.7 trillion are the total receipts (est.). Total spending (est.) is $3.1 trillion, which assumes total "discretionary spending" is in place. So if all "discretionary spending" is spent, our budget deficit for 2009 is (was) $0.2 trillion, or 200,000,000,000 (ie, $200 billion).

Note under "Mandatory Spending", the entry:
$260 billion - Interest on National Debt

That is just over 1/4th of $1 trillion. Back to the 2006 GDP figure for the US of $16 trillion, that would be 1.56% [math: ((.25 * (1/16))*100)] of our entire GDP is being used to service our national debt. We pay only a very small part of our GDP to the gov't in taxes though, since we actually need it to... live on. This amt. of any nation's GDP being spent on bond-driven debt is just insane.

OK, now, back to "discretionary spending". Look at the list; does that look like it's "discretionary" to you?

No wonder there is further talk of "raising the deficit limit" on the federal government's budget.

2/1/10: UPDATE:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_bi_ge/us_budget

'WASHINGTON – Spelling out painful priorities, President Barack Obama urged Congress on Monday to quickly approve a huge new shot of spending for recession relief and job creation, part of a record $3.8 trillion budget that would boost the deficit beyond any in the nation's history while only slowly beginning to put Americans back to work.

If Congress goes along with Obama's election-year plan, the nation would still end the year with unemployment pushing double digits at 9.8 percent and this year's pool of government red ink deepening to $1.56 trillion — by the administration's accounting.'

Honestly now, the math escapes me. I am not sure what to do with all these new numbers. I just know this: it's a lot more red ink than even I had at first seen.

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And not to shift gears to fast, but did you see this?: WEF Security Officer Dies in Probable Suicide, District Says

I don't believe this for a second.