US/gov/budget/debt

About

The United States is somewhat legendary for its enormous federal debt, and has been since at least the Reagan administration.

The budget deficit went from a net positive position during the Clinton-Gore administration to unsustainable levels during the Bush-Cheney administration and was then reined in substantially during the Obama-Biden administration.

A budget deficit is the amount of shortfall between income and spending. Debt increases when there is a budget deficit and decreases when there is a budget surplus.

2011-04-14 Senate passes 2011 funding bill, rejects measures to defund Planned Parenthood and health care
2011-04-13 "Patriotic Millionaires": Raise our taxes, please!
2010-11-13 Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget (note: does not function in Firefox under Linux; works with Google Chrome): we should be demanding tools like this for every budget battle

2015/02/04 [L..T] Paul Ryan's First Tax Legislation Adds Nearly $100 Billion To Deficit "The first bills promoted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as the new chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee would add nearly $100 billion to the deficit over 10 years. [..] Ryan, a deficit hawk during his time as the chairman of the Budget Committee for the previous six years, made his fame proposing budgets that aimed to dramatically cut domestic spending and balance the budget within a decade."
2014/06/11 [L..T] U.S. Budget Deficit Narrows as Economy, Jobs Boost Revenue "The U.S. posted a $130 billion budget deficit in May and the smallest shortfall for the first eight months of a fiscal year since 2008, as a stronger economy and rising employment bolster revenue."
2014/04/24 [L..T] The Economic Argument Is Over – And Paul Krugman Won "Once the error was corrected, the "90% debt-to-GDP threshold" instantly disappeared. Higher government debt levels still correlated with slower economic growth, but the relationship was not nearly as pronounced. And there was no dangerous point-of-no-return that countries had to avoid exceeding at all costs."
2014/04/09 [L..T] Retiring the A-10 Early Puts Troops' Lives at Risk