I have a question regarding the federal budget. When Congress passes
a spending bill and it contains some item like $83 million to repave
a highway or something, does that mean exactly $83,000,000, or is it
just an approximate figure?
I tried looking up the federal budget and I never found any info that
gave the precise figures allotted to each government agency, the
were either listed in millions or billions of dollars (e.g. $1,800
million or $1.8 billion).
Another thing I want to know is that if Congress must approve all
gov't spending, how they can pass a bill allocating a certain amount
for a program which then goes into the usual cost overrun. That
stupid Medicare prescription drug benefit comes to mind; Congress
was told it would cost $400 billion and approved $400 billion which
I assume is $400,000,000,000 exactly, then immediately afterward the
cost rose to $550 billion, now about $750 billion, and expected to
reach $1 trillion in the next year or so. AFAIK they never voted to
allocate the extra $600 billion, so how can the federal government
spend it?
And the reason I asked the first question is that I'm suspecting they
interchange full and abbreviated figures for embezzlement purposes.
So perhaps Congress votes to allocate $3,862,714,936 for road repairs
which is then entered as $3.86 billion in the books, leaving $2,714,936
that disappears as a rounding error. $3,860,000,000 is what is
actually delivered, while $2,714,936 are rounded off into a Swiss bank
account. Just my theory...
.
|
