Meet the Press   |  January 06, 2013

What if the Federal Government budgeted like a family?

David Gregory breaks down, in simple terms, how the numbers would look if you brought the federal finances down to family size.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> numbers being thrown around in the last two weeks during the fiscal cliff negotiations, we thought we'd try to put things into perspective. take a look at these figures. these are the key numbers in simple terms for money that the u.s. takes in and spends roughly every year. you see the amount we spend is greater than the total taxes revenue. and that's the difference between the two, or the money we have to find or borrow to cover our spending. and there's the total debt. $16.4 trillion to the united states government . if we wanted to bring those numbers down to size, say for a family budget by removing some of those down thing zeros, here's what it would look like. the family would have an income of about $in,000 while in that same year spending more than they take in. $38,000. that would mean $14,000 or so would have to be put on a credit card that already has a balance of about $164,000. in the past, it's been politically difficult to make far-reaching cuts. the debt ceiling deal back in april of 2011 cuts $38.5 billion in spending. if you scale that down to your family example we just showed you, that would be like paying down $154,000 credit card balance by $385. so bigger automatic