The US Daily Cash Deficit for Wednesday 5/21/2014 was $7.7B bringing the May 2014 deficit through 21 days to $90B with just 6 business days remaining.
We see revenues again take a baby step backwards, but this time it is probably the timing of customs/excise taxes…we’ll probably get a $1.5B bump in the next day or two that catches us back up in that category at least. Other than that, and our other outstanding timing issues…this month looks remarkably similar to last year.
The US Daily Cash Deficit for Tuesday 5/20/2014 was $6.7B bringing the May 2014 deficit through 20 days to $82B with 7 business days remaining. 
It was a fairly typical Tuesday…low revenues and average outlays. Revenues were actually down about $600M…not terrible, but not in the right direction. Looking back a few weeks to my May 2014 deficit forecast of $133B….I’d say we are still pretty much on track to end up pretty close to that. We will continue to see the deficit grow moderately over the next week until next Friday 5/30…when we will probably see a $30B+ deficit primarily driven by outlays due June 1 being pulled into May by the timing of the weekend. The same thing happened last May, so we still end up with two roughly comparable months.
The US Daily Cash Surplus for Monday 5/19/2014 was $5.8B bringing the May 2014 deficit through 19 days to $76B.
Revenues continue to make gains…we are now at $-2B with 8 business days remaining. Last year May revenues came in at $215B, so if we want to get to +5%, we’d need to get to +11B by the end of the month….or a little over +$1B per day gains, which definitely looks possible…we’ll have to wait and see though. Outlays are on track to end the month down $10B or so overall…primarily to there being one less business day….we’ll take it I guess.
The April 2014 SS numbers are in and we added 130,874 people to the consolidated headcount just barely edging last years 130,724 add by 150 people. The total consolidated enrollment now stands at 58.472M…good for 18.38% of the population.
So in the big picture, we are still plodding along at an annualized rate adding about 1.1M people a year….pencil that out assuming new benefits at a rate of $1500/month, that’s about $20B per year…a big chunk of the programs ~50B growth rate….with the rest being primarily the COLA adjustments which are small, but being applied to a huge base.. At that rate, assuming everything else in the entire budget is frozen…we need about 1.6% annual growth in revenues just to stay even….or about what we just saw in April.
But the real reason I watch this series is because I am watching for a material change in the enrollment trend. Clearly we don’t have that this month. What we do have is two months of essentially no YOY change against over a 4 year trend of moderate decline. Two months in a row isn’t particularly alarming, but a few more would definitely be interesting.
The US Daily Cash Surplus for Friday 5/16/2014 was $7.3B bringing the May 2014 deficit through 16 days to $81B.
It was a really good day for revenue…we see a YOY gain of about $8B primarily on withheld taxes. I don’t fully understand it…maybe a YOY timing change, but we’ll take it….a $4B hole at mid month is a lot less daunting than yesterdays $12B YOY revenue shortfall…a few more of these and we’re back on track.