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us 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 05
0

US February 2013 Cash Deficit Review: Part 1

By | Daily Deficit
Another month has come and gone. We are all now 28 days closer to death….whenever that will be. We are 28 days closer to the day our star, the sun, runs out of hydrogen, begins it’s transition to a red giant, and ultimately cooks the earth into crunchy black char ball before destroying it altogether. And… perhaps even more ominously… we are 28 days closer to the day the US government begins defaulting on its on and off balance sheet liabilities. For all of these certain future events, we can’t predict  the exact date they will occur….but we do know with absolute precision that we are one month closer to the day of reckoning than we were a month ago.
DEFICIT:
But enough gloom and doom, let’s crunch the numbers and see what happened in February and what it means for the big picture. As we have discussed in prior posts, February is almost always the worst month of the year for deficits, even back in the good ol’ days like 2000 when we kinda sorta actually had an annual surplus…depending on what kind of accounting you used (shady vs. shadier??) So we came in at $229B…a bit under last year, but right in line with the last 5 years. Clearly what little improvement we have is immaterial…a mere 8% improvement, and there is a good chance most of that is related to delayed tax refunds.
022013 Deficit vs py
REVENUE:
The biggest deficit related news in the last few months may have been the President’s tax hikes…namely about $60B per year on the wealthy…and about $120B per year on those of us who pay payroll tax. So let’s take a look at revenues by category with this screenshot from excel. You may recall that 2/2013 revenue was $95B vs. $80B last year. I need to clarify that this is “net” revenues….We take all revenues from the sources listed below, then subtract tax refunds to get net revenues. Since February is especially heavy in refunds, the net is always much lower than other months, but we apply it consistently, and I am much more comfortable with this accounting approach.

022013 Revenues by Source

 In yellow I have highlighted some of the more interesting sources of revenue. Federal reserve earnings are down almost $3B…this is a bit odd and I will definitely be keeping an eye on this. Federal reserve “earnings” primarily consist of them printing money, and using it to lend money to the federal government by purchasing bonds. Then, the treasury sends the Federal reserve interest payments…and the federal reserve turns around and sends that…less their costs…back to the treasury? Sounds kind of shady huh? You bet your a** it is. Moving on “FTD’s” (nope..it’s not what you are thinking)…Federal Tax Deposits is the governments primary revenue stream….made up mostly of  taxes (income and payroll) withheld from your paycheck and sent in to Uncle Sam. They are up, but only $7.5B…we’re expecting ~$15B per year thanks to the recent tax hikes. It could just be the extra day in February 2012, but I’m not entirely convinced this is the case.
Next we see that “Other” deposits….are down $7B, but that deposits from TARP are up almost 500%. You may recall Tarp from years ago…where our government lent hundreds of billions of dollars of public money to all their donors, buddies ect… at below market rates. As those loans are repaid…and a good chunk of them were…the money comes back in as revenue. It’s not perfect, but as an Uncertified Public Accountant, it still gets my stamp of approval. For more information on this, take a look at “We Won’t Miss TARP, But Uncle Sam Will”. Finally, we get to the big number…Individual Tax refunds were down year over year by $15B, presumably because of the tax filing being pushed back a week or two and subsequent processing delays. If we back this out, then what we have for the month is a small increase in FTD’s offset by small decreases elsewhere for flat YOY revenue…despite tax increases….that’s not a good sign, but one month does not make a trend…lets see how March turns out before we turn on the recession alarms..ok maybe April.
Ok guys…this is getting long, so i’m going to split it in half and do the spending and debt analysis tomorrow. If you were wondering about the 3/1 daily deficit…it was a whopping $53.5B….I’m going to hold off a day or two for the charts because the timing is making the year on year charts go nuts so it doesn’t really make sense yet.
Feb 21
0

Daily US Deficit For 2/19/2013

By | Daily Deficit
The US Daily Surplus for 2/19/2012 was $10.1B on strong revenues, which we usually see on the Tuesday after a holiday as they report all of the weekend receipts, plus Monday and Tuesday all in one day. Refunds were down, at $4.2B about half of the refunds issued 2/15/2013. The February deficit through 19 days is $154B compared to $185 for 2012.  At $31B under,  for the first time in a while we see some improvement over 2012 not completely attributable to timing, though about $20B is likely timing related to social security and refunds. With 7 business days left, if 2013 is going to top 2012, we will have to average about $14B per day. I don’t see that happening without a large uptick in the pace of refunds, so stay tuned.

2013-02-19 USDD

Feb 16
0

Daily US Deficit For 2/14/2013

By | Daily Deficit
The US Daily Deficit for 2/14/2013 was $6.2B bringing the February 2013 deficit through 14 days to $122B, still pretty much in line with 2012 on all fronts. In other news, it has been about two weeks since the debt limit was raised, and not surprisingly, the debt has increased $107B over that period after an immediate $41B increase. The current cash balance is $51B, and there are approximately three more months until we get to start playing that game again…May 19 if memory serves. The next DTS won’t be issued until next Tuesday because of Presidents Day, but it could be another whopper due to a large interest payment I am expecting will be made today. $40B+/-  deficit for 2/15/2013 is in the ballpark of what we can expect.

2013-02-14 USDD

Feb 15
0

Daily US Deficit For 2/13/2013

By | Daily Deficit

The US Daily Deficit for 2/13/2013 was $23.3B bringing the February deficit to $116B, almost completely closing the $35B gap between 2013 and 2012 we saw as recently as yesterday. With net revenues and outlays flat, and refunds accelerating, we appear to be on track for another February deficit in the $250B range. It is worth noting that gross tax deposits unadjusted for refunds are higher than 2012 by 8%, unfortunately, that’s only $6B, just barely enough to pay for about half of the refunds that went out just yesterday. Just a final note, net revenue does show as negative for 2/13, this is because refunds issued exceeded tax deposits.

2013-02-13 USDD