To Put It All In Perspective .... 

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective: 

U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000 

Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000 

New debt: $1,650,000,000,000 

National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget) 

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family. 

Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700 

Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200 

Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500 

Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710 

Amount cut from the budget: $385 

 Whew! I'm glad they got that all worked out to our benefit, aren't you? I feel better already.