The Debt to the Penny
Somehow, someone's figured out how to calculate the federal debt down to the penny:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm
On January 26th, that amount stood at $8,190,567,748,779.48. It's a little hard to read, as your eye passes over all the sets of three digits and commas. It is a long number. Rounding it down just a hundred billion dollars or so we get a big fat, whole value of $8 trillion dollars.
It's a good thing we can round down, because the legal limit set by Congress for our federal debt is $8.148 trillion, or $8,148,000,000,000.00 when looked at long hand. If you look closely, it is clear that we have already shot through the ceiling.
San Francisco Chronicle article from January 8th, 2006
posted by thng at 5:01 PM
1 Comments:
nanglo,
I understand that the federal deficit is cumulative - its the total that keeps growing year after year. There's also the yearly measure - the federal debt i think - and that goes up and down depending on the fiscal policies of the administration. So they are different - it wasn't the trade deficit that went down.
Also, I understand that during Clinton's reign, the federal debt didn't really go down either - it was just some accounting tricks.
9:54 AM
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