3.9 Trillion And Other Fun Numbers

There's another budget storm in Washington. Politicians are pointing fingers, pundits are claiming the end of the world is nigh and the 24/7 crisis media is winding itself into another frenzy.

In order to put things in perspective, I thought it might be time to have a little fun with numbers.

President Obama has proposed a 3.6 trillion dollar budget - that's $3,600,000,000,000.00

The United States is projected to bring in 2.4 trillion dollars in taxes

So we're talking about a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit.

1.2 trillion dollars is what we will add to the deficit this year - 1.2 trillion dollars is also about what the entire Federal budget was just two decades ago.

In order to bring in $3.6 trillion - every single one of the 307,006,550 people in America would need to be taxed $11,726

OR it means that every single one of the 114,825,428 households would need to be taxed $31,351.94.

But that's OK because median household income in the US is $46,326 - so the median US household will still have about $15,000 a year to live off.

In case you were wondering, the US Census Bureau defines "poverty" as anyone making less than $22,350 per year.

And that's why 47% of US households pay NO Federal taxes at all.

But there's no need to worry about the people who are currently poor. The President's proposed budget allots $888,000,000,000 for welfare - so the more than 8 million families living below the poverty level today can receive roughly $108,997 each in government pay and benefits.

Meanwhile the 53% of households that do pay taxes... well... they'll all need to pay $59,154.60 each in order to meet the President's proposed budget.

And that's rough because that's about $12,000 more than most of them bring in each year.

Boy - with weighty issues like this looming, it's a good thing we averted that government shutdown. After all, the Federal government is responsible for spending about $69 billion dollars a day.

And that means that if we shut it down for just three weeks, we'd save about a trillion dollars.

Now there's an idea.