The US Daily Deficit for 2/6/2013 was $2.6B bringing the total deficit through 6 days to $66B, $14B under last year, primarily due to refunds running $12B under last year. I’m not sure yet how this is going to all play out. One possibility is that everybody who usually filed in the middle of January simply filed 1/30, and that we will see a spike in about a week and 2013 will start to catch back up to 2012. The other possibility is that there are system processing constraints that will simply push back everything, meaning that February would never catch up…refunds would just get pushed into March, skewing our monthly profiles and making next year that much more difficult to forecast:) There were $53B of refunds issued in the last 8 calendar days of February 2012, so all else equal, that would put the 2013 deficit ending at around “only” $200B. I’m pulling for the IRS’s refund department to power through so my charts don’t get screwed up for the next 2 years!!
