The US Daily Deficit for 1/8/2013 was $7.1B bringing the January Deficit through 8 days to $33B, $4B less than 2012 through 8 days. Expect another deficit in the $7-$13B range tomorrow as the next round of Social Security payments went out today.
An interesting (to me) methodology note on Social Security outlays… On the DTS, only Social Security payments made by EFT are segregated..Anything sent by check simply falls out into Other as those checks are cashed. It is a flaw in the data, but since 90-95% is paid by EFT, it’s not a huge data flaw, though admitedly one would expect that % to be slowly increasing as time goes by. However…Last year, Social Security announced that it planned on phasing out checks altogether in March of 2013. That does not appear to be a hard date, but if they are successful, it would mean that 1) the DTS would become a tad bit more accurate, with less falling through to other. 2) it would also mean that what numbers I am seeing will increase, even if everything else is equal (not that they will be), just because the % is rising. I have no no plans to adjust my data…the calculated deficit will be unchanged, it’s just that in the past, Social security outlay’s have been understated, and going forward, they will be (more) correctly stated.
Ok…moving on, below are the charts through 8 days. Revenue is still well ahead of prior years, but now cost is as well. I’d give it at least another week before timing really ceases to be an issue. Also, i adjusted the size of the new charts some…they looked a bit stretched out compared to how they looked originally in excel, hopefully this fixes them, or at least is an improvement.
