{"id":2465,"date":"2006-07-23T09:53:46","date_gmt":"2006-07-23T09:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2006-07-23T09:53:46","modified_gmt":"2006-07-23T09:53:46","slug":"how_big_is_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2465","title":{"rendered":"How Big is the Federal Deficit &#8211; Really?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ctj.org\/pdf\/def0706.pdf\">Citizens for Tax Justice<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>n July, the Bush administration estimated that the fiscal 2006 budget deficit, including  $174 billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, will be $470 billion. That will bring total federal borrowing over the past five years to $2,449 billion. <\/p>\n<p>That $2.4 trillion in borrowing means that from fiscal 2002 through fiscal 2006, a quarter of non-Social Security federal spending will be financed with borrowed money. In contrast, in fiscal 1999 through 2001, the federal government did not borrow a penny from the Social Security Trust Fund. <\/p>\n<p>Indeed, the government saved all of Social Security&rsquo;s $434 billion in surpluses, and actually ran surpluses in its regular budget, too, thus paying down the national debt by $120 billion.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Citizens for Tax Justice: n July, the Bush administration estimated that the fiscal 2006 budget deficit, including $174 billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, will be $470 billion. That will bring total federal borrowing over the past five years to $2,449 billion. That $2.4 trillion in borrowing means that from fiscal 2002 through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}