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Government Finance 101: Welcome to Alice in Wonderland

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    Fiscal Policy   Some basic definitions:   Deficit.    The difference between the federal government’s spending and its revenue in one fiscal year.   The fiscal year starts on October 1.  So fiscal year 2024 started on October 1, 2023. You know right away this is going to be confusing. Yearly deficits before the coronavirus were around $1 trillion per year. For fiscal year 2021, the deficit was $2.8 trillion. Total stimulus spending and tax cuts were around $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest projection is an average yearly deficit of $1.5 trillion for the next 10 years. This should be viewed as a minimum.   Social Security and Medicare are funded by their own taxes and working down their trust funds (selling government bonds). Subtracting Social Security and Medicare taxes from the Federal budget, other revenue covers about 50-60% of all other government spending; the other 40-50% is the deficit and financed by borrowing.   Debt .  Short for national debt.
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American Colonial History, 1607-1775

  American Colonial History, 1607-1775   Preliminary Comments   Between 1607 and 1775 about 550,000 – 600,000 Europeans migrated to the American colonies. Most American families were immigrants (or refugees) or had recent immigrant pasts. They were risk-takers. They left long-settled communities and societies to get on small, crowded sailing ships to make the dangerous 3,000 voyage to a new land that was mostly wilderness. Many died. They had to adapt to a new, frontier environment. They had to “tame the howling wilderness.” A high percent of the European immigrants in this period were from England, Scotland, and Scots from Northern Ireland. Almost all were Protestants.   Emigrants from England and Scotland came over in four “waves.” They were four distinctly different groups of people from different areas of the English isles.   To understand why these four groups left England and Scotland, at different times, it is necessary to know a little bit of English history during this period.
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