Federal Government will happily take donations to balance national budget

From Collegenews.com

If you have extra money, and want to help pay down the enormous national debt, an under-the-radar law from 1961 lets you do just that. The federal government will accept contributions that are directly applied to government debt--which, of course, are tax deductible.

On average, most donations are less than $100, though there have been a few substantially large contributions since the law was enacted. According to CNN Money, the largest such gift occurred in 1992, in the amount of $3.5 million.

So far, total contributions for 2009 are slightly over $3 million. Though this number is significantly higher than any yearly total in the last 10 years, it pales in comparison to total donations in 1994, which were just shy of $21 million.

While every little donation does help, the contributions are not doing much to really reduce the amount of debt. “We might have to finance a tiny bit less that week,” Mckayla Braden, a spokesperson for the Bureau of the Public Debt, said to CNN Money.