Sorry for the delay on this one…It took a lot longer to get through the editing process at Seeking Alpha than I expected. Here’s the link.
It’s worth the trouble to get these published at SA first because it it pushes the article, and this site out to a far wider audience that it would get here alone. Also, I get paid per page view, which let’s be honest, isn’t much, but I won’t be sending it back. So click on over and tell all your friends about it!!
Happy New Year!! The US Daily Deficit for 1/2/2013 was $3.1B. I’m not going to put up any charts and it’s too early in the month to really predict anything, so let’s take a look back at January 2012. A year ago, the deficit was $53B on 256B of revenue and $309B in outlays. It seems likely that we will see improvement over last January. We are coming off a pretty strong revenue month in 12/2012 which could carry over. There are some smaller timing issues related to outlays that should help a little bit, and finally, with the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the increasing of rates for the “wealthy”, we should start seeing revenues running $15-20B higher…on top of what we were seeing. On the other hand, social security recipients get a 1.7% raise this month…good for around another $1B per month…plus the 10k people who retire every day. I shouldn’t even throw a number out but what the heck. I’ll throw my dart at a $10B deficit for this month. Last month, my initial prediction was $30B deficit and we ended up with a $21B surplus….let’s see how this month ends up.
Swing and a Miss!! The US Daily Deficit for 12/31/2012 was $1.4B, substantially lower than my projection if $15-25B, leaving December’s surplus solidly intact at $20.6B vs December 2011’s $59.3B deficit. I’ll have more analysis later, but Revenue was up $45B and Outlays were down $35B resulting in an $80B improvement. No too shabby, if it it sticks. I’m hoping to get a 2012 total year piece posted in the next few days, and after that maybe a more in depth review of December and a look at January. So many things to do, so little time.
The US Daily Surplus for 12/28/2012 was $4.0B, bringing the surplus to $22B with 1 business days remaining in December. Today, 12/31/2012 will likely record a large deficit in the 15-25B range, but we’ll have to wait till Wednesday afternoon to find out. Last year, the deficit for 12/31 was $19.7B.
Happy New Years to All…be safe and enjoy the day off. I’ll be working tomorrow…note to self…in my next life, choose a career other than accounting!!
