Talk:United States federal budget

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[edit] 2008

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (February 2007)

The FY2008 proposal has been made, if anyone wants to dive in. -- Beland 13:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


The link to the CNN article is broken. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.5.68.249 (talk) 21:17, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Are these budget totals adjusted for inflation or are they real world dollars? 12.39.246.66 (talk) 21:23, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Why is spending highlighted with a huge graph, when the other half of the budget -- revenue -- is ignored?210.176.69.125 (talk) 01:01, 11 January 2008 (UTC) DOR (HK) Jan 11, 2008

A question I can answer! Because like all good accounting sheets, expenditures=revenues! That is because (see below) we are borrowing money from the Chinese! So a statement of revenue it wouldn't be very enlightening, officially. You probably mean before borrowing. Ah. Another story. Student7 (talk) 02:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Untouched federal insurance

While the article preserves the fiction that people "save up" money in Medicare, Medicade and Social Security, the truth is that any money that is received is spent immediately. This has resulted in massive borrowing from China, of all places. As the baby boomers retire it will get much worse. Ignored officially and I suppose therefore echoed in the article is the fact (see US News and World Report page 64, Feb 18, 2008), entitlements ignored in the article are currently taking up 40% of the budget. This is expected to hit 70% in 2030. Let's hope the Chinese cooperate!  :) Instead, candidates are talking about expanded medical insurance when the government is currently going bust on what little is available. Too bad it's too taboo to mention here. Student7 (talk) 02:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

There are reliable sources that have pointed out that the money that has "built up" in the trust funds is in fact IOUs from the federal government, not actual investments, and that those IOUs (federal debt) require taxes or other revenue sources to actually be paid off. As for expanding medical insurance, please note that this is to some extent merely rearranging costs - businesses pay less, or individuals pay less, and the government pays more. To the extent that private entities and individuals do pay less, that provides the government more "opportunity" to raise tax levels. (But, as you point out, these kind of discussions are generally inappropriate for article talk pages; you might console yourself by noting that Wikipedia's goal is not to solve the world's problems by highlighting the most important ones, but simply to provide information on various subjects and let readers decide. I can assure you that any argument that you think is really important has in fact been mentioned somewhere in a reliable source; the challenge is to find it and add it to the appropriate article.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:25, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Future reporting of debt

The changes recently have been good. Wikipedia reports best when it reports the past. Wikipedia is a little weak when it comes to reporting the future. I realize that the editor was quoting from a supposed reputable source here, but I would prefer that debt be predicted (chancey being the future anyway) by year rather than collecting a bunch of arbitrary years together and saying that the debt would be thus over a huge number of years which the media and opposition parties do on a regular basis to make their POV. I suggest we not contribute to anyone else's pov. Just find an annual predicted debt and go with that. The collection over years is done merely for the purpose of exaggerating the facts.

BTW I have a clipping from the 60s proving conclusively that the US would "go broke" in 20 years, whatever that meant then. (Maybe we did but the sky didn't fall quite as hard as the columnist had intended with his article). Student7 (talk) 11:38, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's reasonable to discuss projections for the near future - the next five years or so, for example. Beyond that, much less so. It's still good to have citations to articles which do discuss long-term trends; then the reader can decide on credibility him/herself. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:19, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm on a monthly budget myself. The government is on an annual budget. Budget have meaning over one year, but none over a cycle longer than one year. The only reason for using more than one year IMO is to hype something. I don't think this should be a forum for media-type hyping. Student7 (talk) 20:51, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
We don't decide what isn't newsworthy; that would be a form of censorship. And I disagree with you - it's useful to project revenues and expenditures over the next few years, and see the extent of the resulting deficits (or, occasionally, surpluses). (Nor is it true that the government is on the same sort of annual budget as you are - the government has the ability to sell bonds to fund its deficit; you don't.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:23, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
The government is not on a five-year budget. To claim that it is, is POV, which the media definitely has. It is not true that everything has to be quoted because it is in a newspaper someplace. And it is not censorship to ignore blatant pov viewpoints. That has been debated already. I'm not sure it is relevant. That is that a fifty or one hundred year obligation or deficiency is relevant to a discussion of a government that budgets year by year. Student7 (talk) 22:35, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Gents, an interesting discussion. Understand that these points of view were expressed by government agencies - Treasury, GAO, and CBO. Only Treasury could be argued to be partisan. The choice of wording by these agencies is very blunt. I think Student7 would have a stronger argument for the articles on the one year budgets (e.g. 2007, 2008, 2009) but here in an overall article on the budget the various past and future considerations should be present. Clearly, there is a school of thought that "debt doesn't matter" (and they often use debt to GDP as their argument) but that argument is repudiated by the sources above. If credible "debt doesn't matter" sources can be cited, that would balance these. But the Treasury, GAO and CBO points are legitimate to include, as they are from among the most credible sources.Farcaster (talk) 23:34, 29 April 2008 (UTC)


Another thought, based on the above ideas, is to report both, explaining that one seems to understate it and why and the other to overstate it and why. That is, not so much to give figures to either one, but to report on the reporting of figures which is political whichever way you look at it. My thought is there is a subsection addressing the pov reporting (both ways). My blunt words here are obviously pov in themselves and references have to be found to pretty them up. Maybe not so hard since someone seems to have a grip on both arguments. Student7 (talk) 22:20, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Future deficits - separate article

I thought I'd start a new section - my sense is that we're trying to put too much into this article. An article on the U.S. deficit or U.S. federal deficit or U.S. budget projections or similar would, in my opinion, be an appropriate place to discuss what is frequently discussed in the press - for example, will deficits increase as a percentage of the GDP? Can the federal government continue to borrow more and more and still have top-rated debt?

This article, by contrast, is lacking such things as a discussion of the pros and cons of a unified budget (at one time, Social Security was NOT part of the main federal budget), and much more discussion on having a separate capital budget (which has been repeatedly recommended by the Government Accountability Office. Nor is there any discussion of how long the a full budget cycle is - for example, in the Department of Defense, initial requests for capital expenditures begin several years before the budget goes to Congress for its review. Or a discussion of "lame duck" budgets. Nor would you know, from reading this article, that Congress rarely passes the budget by the deadline of 1 October (and, in fact, that Congress adjourned at the end of 2006 [early 2007?] without having passed most departmental budgets at all, leaving it up to the next Congress to deal with the problem). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:20, 1 May 2008 (UTC)