For the Government's bookkeepers, New Year's Day came last week. Treasury Secretary John Snyder greeted it happily. His balance sheet of the world's biggest business for fiscal 1948 read:
Receipts $44,745,542,076.64
Expenditures 36,326,072,232.83
Surplus $8,419,469,843.81
The surplus was the biggest in U.S. history.* Spending was down $6.17 billion from fiscal 1947, due largely to military savings and delays in foreign-aid spending. Revenues were up $1.4 billion (other taxes more than made up the $600 million loss in reduced income taxes).
As the money rolled in during the year, the national debt was pared by almost $6 billion, now stands at $252 billion...
