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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (120971)	1/3/2001 5:58:29 PM
From: WTSherman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Neo, the best way to understand this is that the U.S. Government does virtually all its accounting on a current year basis. It matches receipts(what we all would call revenues, but, that sounds like a business to them) against outlays(expenses). If there are greater receipts than outlays there is a surplus, if reversed there is a deficit. Included in the budget is an estimate of what the interest expense on the debt will be. This is an estimate because they know what will mature, but, don't know what interest rate they will have to pay if they have to roll it over. They also don't know if the estimate of receipts/outlays will actually turn out to be correct. If there is a greater deficit they have to issue more debt, if there is a greater surplus they issue less debt. If they accounted for things on more than a current year basis, they could accrue funds for debt retirement. But, since the gov't actually creates the money, the idea of a gov't "saving" money like it was in a piggy bank doesn't make any sense. So, they don't bother. The bottom line is that since they don't accrue anything for maturing debt, they only pay off debt when the have excess funds. That only occurs when there is a budget surplus.