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Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Crash Course Government and Politics #48

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Today, Craig is going to dive into the controversy of monetary and fiscal policy. Monetary and fiscal policy are ways the government, and most notably the Federal Reserve, influences the economy - for better or for worse.

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The Executive Branch is responsible for the federal budget.

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The Executive Branch is responsible for the federal budget.

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But it has to be approved by Congress.

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This is the main source of revenue for the government. It is imposed on any income. Right now this is split into brackets which decide how much you pay. This is what you deal with for the taxes due on April 15th every year.

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Some people say "lets just cut spending" but this is hard because of the mandatory and discretionary spending. there are laws requiring money to be spent on things such as social security and the only way to change this would be to change the law which would have a huge affect on our economy. Another way to fix this would be to raise taxes but that makes a lot of people made and leads to the increase in prices on almost everything.

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Expenditure- the action of spending funds ex. interest on national debt
Revenue- collected by the government as taxes; used to create a budget
Entitlement- ​benefit required by law, including government pension
"Uncontrollables"- mandatory spending written into laws; ex. interest payments on federal debt, subsides, social security, medicare
Discretionary spending- the things the government is not required to spend money on; ex. defense, medicaid, department of education

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continuously updated us national debt clock real time us debt clock

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US National Debt Clock : Real Time U.S. National Debt Clock

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When the government spends more than it brings in. Also produces debt.

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Surplus is when the government brings in more money than it spends. unfortunately that last time we had surplus in a fiscal year was 2001, this was the year George W. Bush took office.