FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 14, 2008
Contact: Jennifer Zuccarelli, Treasury Department, (202) 622-8657
          Jane Lee, OMB Communications, (202) 395-7254

Citizen’s Guide Provides Easy Public Access
to Government’s Financial Report

Washington — The Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today released The Government’s Financial Health:  A Citizen’s Guide to the 2007 Financial Report of the United States Government.  The eight-page Citizen’s Guide provides readers with a user-friendly reference tool for finding key results of the Financial Report released in December 2007.  This is the first time the Federal government has issued this type of summary.  A similar summary report will be published annually hereafter.

Drafted in coordination with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Citizen’s Guide provides an overview of the U.S. government’s short-term and long-term financial outlook, including the government’s biggest fiscal challenge, the unsustainable growth in entitlement programs.

In the next 35 years, the automatic spending portion of the budget will completely swallow all available revenue, which means that resources will not be available for some of the Federal government’s basic responsibilities, such as national defense and homeland security.  The Citizen’s Guide makes this kind of information easily available to a broad audience, explaining these realities in clear and stark terms. 

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