Big bunches of money just disappearing at a record clip:
The government racked up a record-high monthly budget deficit of $220.9 billion in February, the Treasury Department announced today.
The latest flood of red ink brings the total deficit for the first five months of the current fiscal year to $651 billion, far exceeding the $589 billion shortfall for the same timeframe in the last fiscal year.
The government ended the 2009 fiscal year with a record $1.4 trillion shortfall. The Obama administration has forecast a $1.56 trillion deficit for this year.
Now, remember, there hasn’t actually been a big bunch of new spending – not a lot of TARPs and supplemental war funding bills since October. In other words, on the expenditure side, things have been pretty much gonig as planned for FY 2010.
So, why is the deficit rising so high? Could it be that revenues are down. And if revenues are down, economic activity is down. And if economic activity is down…then the whole economic “recovery” simply isn’t happening…
This, when coupled with the continuing, rapid decline in sales tax revenues at the State level is a more solid indicator of the true state of the economy than all the stats and happy talk in the world.
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