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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (373911)	3/12/2008 12:19:54 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572956

We have made great strides in energy efficiency. No, we haven't. and relative independence ---------------------------------------- Energy independence isn't a reasonable national level goal. I didn't say it was. But it should be relatively easy to cut our oil usage by 50%. We would still be importing some oil but not 60% of our consumption. "In an effort to satisfy their insatiable appetite for more government spending, the Democrat Majority Party plans... LOL, is this the same Pete Sessions that helped with the Bush drunken sailor spending spree?

To: TimF who wrote (373911)	3/12/2008 4:19:56 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572956

Feb budget gap balloons to record $175.56 bln 1 hour, 32 minutes ago The U.S. government turned in a $175.56 billion budget deficit for February, a record for any month, as federal spending grew but a slowing economy caused receipts to fall 12.1 percent from a year earlier, the U.S. Treasury said on Wednesday. The February gap marked a 46.3 percent increase over the previous all-time single-month deficit of $119.99 billion in February 2007 and soundly exceeded Wall Street economists' consensus estimate of a $160.0 billion deficit in a Reuters poll. February receipts fell to $105.72 billion from $120.31 billion in February 2007, the Treasury said, as both corporate and individual income tax payments slowed. February outlays grew 17.1 percent to $281.29 billion, a record for February, from $240.30 billion in February 2007, the Treasury said. The calendar contributed to the month's grim fiscal results. A Treasury spokeswoman said February outlays were increased by $19 billion because some March benefit payments for Medicare, Social Security and other programs were shifted into February because March started on a Saturday. Due to the leap year, February had five Fridays compared to four a year earlier, causing more tax refunds to be paid out during February, the spokeswoman said. This caused the deficit to increase by another $14.6 billion. For the first five months of fiscal 2008, which began last October 1, the deficit reached a record $263.26 billion, up 62.3 percent from the $162.16 billion for the same period of fiscal 2007. The previous record deficit for the first five months of a fiscal year was set in 2004, a year in which the government also reached its previous record full-year deficit of $413 billion. The White House last month estimated that the fiscal 2008 deficit would hit $410 billion, but that excludes undetermined supplemental spending requests for war funding in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by James Dalgleish)

To: TimF who wrote (373911)	3/14/2008 4:19:00 PM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1572956

Weak dollar costs U.S. economy its world No. 1 spot Fri Mar 14, 11:10 AM ET The U.S. economy lost the title of "world's biggest" to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets. Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the United States when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro. "The curious outcome of breaching this latest milestone is that the size of the euro zone's annual output has now exceeded that of the U.S.," the economics department of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, said in a note to clients. Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP -- $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone -- the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56. The dollar sank to $1.5688 per euro late in European trading hours on Friday, at which rate the euro zone's 2007 GDP equates to $13,880,568.4 billion. The 2007 GDP estimates are as published by the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and provided to Reuters on request for the euro zone by Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office. (Writing by Brian Love; editing by Stephen Nisbet)