• U.S.

FISCAL: $8 Billion Day

1 minute read
TIME

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.

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