The US Daily Cash Deficit for 5/7/2013 was $4.8B bringing the May 2013 deficit through one full week to $44B.
As expected, given a full week, 2013 has more or less synchronized with 2012….and the two years look a lot alike. Looking just at total revenues, we are basically flat, with net revenues up a little over 1B…or 2%. Digging into the details, there are a lot of moving pieces. Taxes withheld are up $5B, or 12%…this is the main metric we are looking for, and it is slightly ahead of where we would expect it to be if 10% was our baseline. However, this is being offset by a $3B decrease in taxes not withheld…as discussed earlier they literally fell off a cliff after 4/30.
I’ve been saying for a while now that May and June of 2013 were going to be our first clean glance at tax revenues following the new tax hikes. The same could probably be said about outlays…we can more or less assume that a month into it, the sequester should be fully in effect by now…so whatever savings there are going to be should show up in cash. So 25% of the way through May, we can see tax deposits holding up and sticking to the same trendline…10-12% growth that we have seen for the last couple of months. This is more or less what we want to see…obviously the bigger the better. Through only 1 week, the gains in taxes withheld are being offset elsewhere, but these will likely become immaterial as the month goes on. Looking at outlays…pretty much spot on with last year…certainly no massive drop-offs, but nobody was really expecting that anyway.
Looking ahead to tomorrow…Social security payments went out today, so a deficit in the $10B range can probably be expected.
