Our National Deficit
The national deficit is the amount of money our government owes, or the difference between the government expenditure and income. The government comes up with this number by using the federal budget. This takes the amount of the government’s income and subtracts their expenditures from that particular number. Whatever the total for the day is gets added to the total national debt, and it builds and grows daily. There is a difference between the national deficit and the national debt. The national deficit is however much more expenses there were than income for the day. The national debt is what is carried over from year to year. Our national debt as of November 5, 2005 at 3:35 pm is approximately $8,032,346,276,421 and is growing by the second.
There have been some cases where the deficit was lower one day than it had been the previous day, called a surplus; but this does not mean that the total national deficit will decrease. This only means that instead of adding a lot more to the national deficit, the government will only add a smaller amount than they did the day before. The way it works is every day some of the deficit is paid off. There is also more deficit created daily. If the government pays off more deficit than it makes for the day, there will be a surplus for the day. In the case of a surplus, the government uses that money to pay off past debt instead of having to borrow more money from the public.
There are two types of surpluses. In the budget, there is a section that is Social Security related and another section which, obviously, is not. The part that deals with the Social Security is off-budget, meaning that a surplus in that section is known as the off-budget surplus. Similarly, the part that does not deal with Soci ...