BizJournals Portfolio
Feb 27 2009 8:42am EDT

US Budget Datapoint of the Day

It's pretty much impossible to get one's head around the sheer enormity of the numbers in Barack Obama's first budget. But it's important to try, and one anonymous commenter has a very good point: the entire federal budget, as submitted by President Clinton in 1996 through 1999, was smaller than the budget deficit that Obama is proposing for next year.

Obama's total budget is $3.6 trillion, which works out at $34,000 per household; median household income is about $50,000. Which basically means that for every dollar that a US household earns, the US government plans to spend 68 cents next year. And the ten-year T-bond still yields less than 3%. Extraordinary.

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