The Cost of Spending: Federal government racking up huge tab

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

Presidents have been talking about the federal government’s spending appetite for decades.

“We can’t spend ourselves rich,” Ronald Reagan once said.

Even President Obama said that “every day, families sacrifice to live within their means – they deserve a government that does the same.”

In the most recent talks to avoid the looming fiscal crisis, though, House Speaker John Boehner insists the president has been singing a different tune, and is “just not serious about cutting spending.”

But how much spending are we actually talking about? It may be difficult to wrap one’s head around how much the federal government doles out every day, but here is a snapshot.

Each day during the month of November, the government brought in a little more than $5 billion of revenue. That’s a lot of money – but the U.S. government spent in that time more than $11 billion a day. The difference is roughly $6 billion.

Of that $11 billion, the top items were as follows: The Department of Health and Human Services, which goes through roughly $3 billion a day; Social Security, which shells out roughly $2.5 billion a day; the Department of Defense, which runs a $1.8 billion daily tab; and interest on the debt, which eats up $854 million every day.

Economists say the latter number is the most concerning of all – since the country gets practically nothing in exchange for that. It’s just paying the bills on the debt, and the number is subject to wild fluctuation.

“We've got a $16 trillion debt, and servicing the debt is hard now,” former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana said. “This is with interest rates at record lows. God forbid something should happen to cause interest rates to go up even a little, back to where they ordinarily would be, the burden of this debt would become immensely greater.”

________

 

Deal or no deal, the spending goes on.