Federal Deficit Up to $1.3 trillion

On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released its latest snapshot on the federal budget. The headlines:

  • The budget deficit was almost $1.3 trillion during the first ten months of the fiscal year (through July). That’s up from $389 billion at this point last year.
  • Spending has risen 21% over last year, while tax revenues have fallen by 17%.
  • CBO estimates that $125 billion of the increased spending and decreased revenues are the result of this year’s stimulus act.

Deficit July

The chart shows the main drivers of the exploding deficit:

  • Tax revenues have fallen off a cliff. Revenues have fallen 17% this year, adding $353 billion to the deficit. As noted in a recent chart from Treasury, the decline has been particularly sharp for corporate incomes taxes (down 57%) and individual income taxes (down 20%).
  • Spending on TARP and the GSEs. CBO estimates that spending to date on TARP will have net cost to taxpayers of $169 billion (For more details on how CBO calculates this, see this post.) In addition, the government has injected $83 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two housing GSEs. Together, these parts of the financial rescue have added $252 billion to the deficit.
  • More spending on other programs. Spending on other programs has increased 14%, adding $325 billion to the deficit. These increases are spread across many program areas; for example, defense spending is up 8% and Medicare spending is up 15%. The most pronounced increases, however, are for unemployment benefits (up more than 160%) and Medicaid (up almost 24%), which have been boosted by the weak economy and expanded Federal programs.

The only piece of good news continues to be interest payments, which are down despite the explosion of federal debt. Payments have fallen on regular Treasury debt because of low interest rates and on inflation-indexed debt because of low inflation.

9 thoughts on “Federal Deficit Up to $1.3 trillion”

  1. Why do you think Medicare spending is up 15%? Is that a demographics problem – more 65+ people? Or is something else going on? It might be interesting to see why as that is the govt run/managed health care program.

    1. Good question. I went back and looked at the monthly CBO report. One factor is a difference in the timing of payment (i.e., whether end-of-month payments showed up in July or were pushed forward to August). Controlling for that, CBO estimates that spending growth in Medicare has been 11% thus far this year. I presume the rest if a mixture of increased enrollment, higher prices, and greater utilization, but I haven’t seen anything that breaks it down.

      1. Even 11% is a substantial increase. As I understand medicare limits its payouts to drs per procedure, so higher dr/hospital/drug prices should not contribute much, if anything.

        Why should we suddenly have a big jump in enrollment or untilization? Now, I can imagine more fraud.

        With all the talk about the govt being better able to control costs over private insurers, one would think this 11% increase (after controlling for payment timing) would set off some alarm bells.

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