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 (down $27 billion from its 1946 peak). The rest of the surplus had gone into the Treasury’s ready cash fund, which now stands at a whopping $4.9 billion.
But the surplus was not actually as high as the books showed. Congress had ordered the Treasury to pay $3 billion out of 1948’s surplus for ECA in 1949.
*Previous high surplus: $1.15 billion on Calvin Coolidge’s paltry 1927 budget of $3 billion. Last year’s black ink—the first after 16 years of living beyond income—showed $754 million.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- See Photos of Devastating Palisades Fire in California
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com