The US Daily Surplus for 1/23/2013 was $2.5B on very strong income tax receipts “not withheld” This is generally taxes paid on investment income and submitted quarterly, or as incurred, unlike taxes withheld from a workers paycheck and remitted every other week by the employer. With 8 days to go, 2013 is already $5B over where 2012 ended in this category. This could be strong evidence of high income individuals pulling income into 2012 to take advantage of the low tax rates before they increased in 2013…or, it could be evidence of a strong recovery…but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Looks like the house has officially approved the debt limit increase, but instead of putting an actual number on it, they gave treasury whatever it takes to get them through May 18. By my math, that’s somewhere between $400 and $500B. However….I think it would be hilarious if treasury just issued like $6T of debt on May 17….pulling in enough cash to get Obama through his second term without needing to think about this again. There are probably some limitations to prevent that, but who knows. I suspect this is all just a slow retreat by the Republicans, who realized a bit too late that they were walking into a minefield with the debt limit and that Obama was ready to call their bluff. They are hoping that between now and May, something else will have caught the publics eye so they can surrender privately. Of course, they did get a couple headlines with their No Budget/No Pay idea, which Democrats rightly called a “gimmick” and a “joke”. But this is politics….and that’s what we vote for, so no surprises really. In the long run, nothing has changed…the US will default on both on and off balance sheet obligations at some point in the future. When it does…it’s not going to be pretty.
The US Daily Surplus for 1/22/2013 was $10B, pulling down the January Deficit through 22 days to $30B. The year on year numbers are still pretty close to 2012, keeping in mind that 2013 is currently 2 business days ahead of 2012. The remainer of the month should be pretty straight forward…I can’t remember what I predicted last time, but $25B looks like a reasonable estimate assuming marginal cost and revenue improvement over 2012 coupled with a slight delay in tax refunds.
The US Daily Deficit for 1/18/2013 was $0.3B. Usually, I do the month to date through the current day, but since we know that 1/19-1/21 were zero, I’m just going to say the January deficit through 21 days was $40B vs $43B in 2012…so virtually the same. Revenue is flat, outlays are flat..deficit is flat. There are 8 business days left…still plenty of time for 2013 to make a run, but through 3 weeks, there is no evidence of increased revenues due to the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the tak hike on high earners. I would expect some delay…especially on the income tax hike…but honestly, those hikes were so tiny, perhaps $15B per month…they could easily get lost in the noise, especially in what promises to be a chaotic 1Q.
