The Numbers Don't Lie

Digging a Deeper Budgetary Hole

Mike Larson
Weiss Research

For the first time since 1983, the Treasury ran a DEFICIT in April. It racked up $20.9 billion in red ink. That was worse than economists were expecting ... worse than the Congressional Budget Office had forecast ... and a huge, huge shift from a year earlier when Treasury recorded a SURPLUS of $159.3 billion.

What happened? Simple. Uncle Sam spent money he didn't have!

Government spending surged 17.5 percent year-over-year, while revenue plunged 34.1 percent. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to know that's a recipe for disaster.

The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is now running at $802.3 billion. That compares to $153.5 billion this time last year. In other words, we've ALREADY dug a budget hole that's more than five times as deep as the one in 2008!

The administration was just forced to raise its 2009 budget deficit estimate to $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the outlook it shared just two months earlier. And the 2010 deficit estimate jumped 7.4 percent to $1.26 trillion. This means we're running a deficit equal to a whopping 12.9 percent of the U.S. economy ... the highest in 64 years!