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US DAILY DEFICIT

Mar 06
0

US February 2013 Cash Deficit Review: Part 2

By | Commentary
And now for the stunning conclusion part 2…part 1 is here if you missed it.

Outlays:

Outlays for 2/2013 ended up at $324B, down $5B from last February’s $329B of outlays…that’s 1.49% if you don’t have a calculator handy. Small, but lets give credit where credit is due. Yet…there’s nothing terribly surprising about this…for a couple of years now, we have seen relatively flat spending as increases driven by the ever growing entitlement programs are mostly offset by decreases in other areas. The spreadsheet below shows the 32 categories for outlays I track, with 2012 vs 2013 YOY and YOY% on the far right columns

022013 Outlays by Type

Right at the top we see that payments to defense vendors and the education department are down by a combined 6.5B…pre sequester, and “Other” is down an additional $4.5B. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare combine for a $6.8B increase, with unemployment payments down $2.7B…which is in line with the trend we have seen over the last year.
One quick note on the federal crop insurance line that went from zero to $1.9B… The DTS is not terribly consistant about reporting “Other” expenses unless there is a large outlay on a particular day. Because of this, I catch what I can, but some of it inevitably falls into my “other” category. In total, we get to the correct total outlays figure, but some of the smaller categories don’t necessarily have the most accurate data. In this case, it is likely that there were at least some outlays in February 2012, but none ended up being large enough to make it onto the DTS. Bottom line with Outlays…it’s great we saw a decrease, but this is nowhere near being a material shift…it will be interesting to see what, if any effect the sequester has over the next few months.
Daily Deficit for 3/4: Although I couldn’t help myself on the 3/1 charts, I’m going to wait another couple days before I resume the YOY charts. If you just have to know, 3/4/2013 ran a $5B surplus on strong Monday revenues. I will wrap up the February review tomorrow with a look at debt
Mar 06
0

Govt spends $80B on Sequestration Day 1

By | Daily Deficit
I know that I said yesterday I wasn’t going to publish the daily deficit for 3/1, but I changed my mind because I think it illustrates the absurdity of the deficit/debt debates we’ve been having for the last few years. The US Daily Cash Deficit for 3/1/2013 was $53.5B…in one friggin day!! The tax increases on the wealthy democrats have been wanting for a decade and finally passed last year bring in a meager $60B per year…as estimated by the CBO…which almost certainly means the numbers are bogus, and it will probably turn out to be $20-$30B in reality. The dreaded sequester…which will hollow out our economy, leave millions homeless and our borders suseptable to Viking Invaders…a mere $85B. So if we can blow through…in one single day almost the same amount we are discussing “cutting” or “taxing” in an entire year, maybe, just maybe, we are not quite grasping the reality of the situation.
I imagine a financial planner sitting down with a couple making $50k a year, but spending $200k. The planner says…you know, this isn’t sustainable, you guys need to cut back. So the wife…sipping a $200 bottle of wine says..you know…I guess we could cut back on the wine a bit. The planner looks at her incredulously…”Lady…I don’t think you understand. You are going to lose your house, your cars…you can forget about wine…you need to start applying for government housing because you are going to be living in a cardboard box in about a week.” That’s the reality of our situation. Uncle Sam is broke as hell and functionally bankrupt. Without the ability to print money and essentially sell ourselves our own debt via our buddies at the federal reserve and playing games with the “trust fund” we would have “for real” bankrupt years ago.
So here it is…On the first day of the sequester…$75B of spending ($80B if you include refunds) out the door. Raise your hand if you think this will end well.

2013-03-01 USDD

Mar 02
0

2/28/2013 Daily US Cash Deficit

By | Daily Deficit
The US Daily Cash Deficit for 2/28/2013 was $8.6B bringing the February 2013 deficit to $229B, a $20B improvement over February 2012. This was fairly close to my guestimate of $225B, so nothing really unexpected here, but I will note that total revenues unadjusted for refunds were flat after a 9% year on year (YOY) increase in January. There were increases in taxes withheld of about 5%, but this was offset by reductions elsewhere. Now part of this is likely due to the extra business day last year, which is also likely the cause in a slight reduction in YOY outlays, but it is still a surprise to me because I expected the tax increases to more than make up for the lost business day, but that clearly was not the case. Of the $15B revenue increase we see in the charts below, every cent of it can be attributed to a delay in refunds, which were down $15B from $129B last year to $114B in 2013. Now, it is entirely possible that tax refunds will just be less in 2013, that would not be unprecedented. But if not, we should see these in March and April. The cumulative difference through 2 months is about $23B, so we will continue to keep an eye on that.
I will do a larger recap over the weekend, but wanted to get this out today. Looking forward to March, last year we ran a $139B deficit, which sounds like a pretty good estimate to me. That assumes this month’s flat revenues were a fluke and that we will see revenue gains in the $15B range…offset by about $15B increase in tax refunds as the IRS catches up with the delays we have seen to date. Not expecting any sequester effect….is that still happening??…but I will keep an eye out for it.

2013-02-28 USDD

Mar 01
0

2/27/2013 Daily US Cash Deficit

By | Daily Deficit

The US Daily Cash Deficit for 2/27/2013 was $23.6B bringing the February deficit to $220B with one day to go. Primary drivers for the rather large daily deficit was the last Social Security EFT of the month at $11.7B and $14.2B of refunds. 2/2012, with one additional business day ended up at $249B, and it seems unlikely that mark will be broken in 2013 thanks to an increase in tax revenues, mostly flat outlays, and a slowdown in tax refunds.

2013-02-27 USDD

Feb 28
0

2/26/2013 Daily US Cash Deficit

By | Daily Deficit
The US Daily Deficit for 2/26/2013 was $10.5B bringing the 2/2013 deficit through 26 days to $197B. We are likely to see large deficits for the remaining two days in the $10B+ range, so ending 2/2013 at $225B seems likely but refunds are kind of random right now and could skew that up or down a bit so +/-10B on that seems fair.

2013-02-26 USDD