Thursday, April 20, 2006

some staggering statistics

  • $8.3 TRILLION: current U.S. national debt. That's an average of $2.19 billion per day since September 30, 2005. Or it works out to about $28,000 for every woman, man and child in this country or about $68,000 per U.S. household.
  • $352 billion: amount our government spent in 2005 just repaying interest on the national debt.
  • $10 billion/month: our government currently spends 10 billion dollars ($10,000,000,000) a month on the occupation and anti-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. That works out to approx. $333 million a day!
  • $94 billion: estimated 2006 costs for our operations in Iraq only ($81 billion in 2005), which are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars.
  • $805 billion: current U.S. trade deficit (measures the flow of all goods, services and investments in and out of the country): by contrast, China has a massive trade surplus.
  • $441 billion: 2006 budget outlay to our military, which does not include discretionary funding or money for Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes. Our military spent 7x more than the Chinese, the second largest spender. Our spending on the military represents about 43% of the total for all military spending in the world (China represented about 7% of total)
  • $56 billion: amount Bush admin is requesting for all federal education spending for 2007.
  • $7.6 billion: amount Bush budgeted for the Environmental Protection Agency for 2007.

For more budget and debt numbers, see this informative Washington Post page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/budget06/budget06Agencies.html

or here: http://zfacts.com/p/461.html

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