U.S deficit half - trillion

Factual Questions
1

A quote from U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

 "Accrual based financial reporting is critical to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. Government’s operations. For fiscal year 2001, our results were an accrual-based deficit of $515 billion in contrast to a $127 billion budget surplus reported last fall."

What do you think of that? How is this possible?

And here’s what you have to do to find it: Go to www.USTreas.gov, click on “Treasury Bureaus” on the left, then click on “financial management services.”

Once you are there, click on “Financial Report of the U.S. Government.” Download it. Now go to page 5, which you can only accomplish by fiddling in just the right way with the bar on the right.

I would like to know your thoughts on this dopers.

2

  1. I don’t know if you are in the workforce or not, but overall the economy freaking sucks relative to last fiscal year.

  2. We had to spend money to punish the freaking assholes responsible for committing atrocities against our country.

  3. Somehow, your link oddly doesn’t work.

3

Really, is a half-trillion-dollar deificit really an issue? Most of the money is owed to taxpayers anyway, in the form of government bonds (which the government issues more bonds to pay off, BTW). So, aside from electiontime posturing and yearlong punditry, does a deficit really matter?

4

Try this once more.
Go to

www.ustreas.gov

5

Short answer:
Yes, sooner or later someone will have to pay the bill.

6

Does defecit matter?

Yes.

The government manages to make its budget look better by taking the surplus from trust funds like Social Security and using that money to pay current expenses. The Social Security cash is replaced with government I.O.U.s which might - or might not - be paid back later.

7

The link had a comma in it. The page (of PDF files) can be found here. I’m not sure what you’re looking for Hoe. An explanation of the difference between accrual and cash-flow accounting methods? Reasons why why one might bounce around more than the other? An account of what this means for the “real” fiscal position/ policy of your government or whether the difference can be “fiddled”?

Crudely, the difference comes from the fact that what the government actually receives and spends may differ from its position when you take into account changes in the unrealised value of things it has an interest in. Those things may be more volatile than cash incomings and outgoings. Uncertainties about the value of government obligations and incomings may mean that even though it would be useful to have an accruals measure, available accruals measures may contain little information at least on a year by year basis.

Ah. On preview, you seem to be looking for a debate.

8

GQ is for questions with factual answers. I don’t see such a question here, so I’ll close this thread.