Happy New Year!! The US Daily Deficit for 1/2/2013 was $3.1B. I’m not going to put up any charts and it’s too early in the month to really predict anything, so let’s take a look back at January 2012. A year ago, the deficit was $53B on 256B of revenue and $309B in outlays. It seems likely that we will see improvement over last January. We are coming off a pretty strong revenue month in 12/2012 which could carry over. There are some smaller timing issues related to outlays that should help a little bit, and finally, with the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the increasing of rates for the “wealthy”, we should start seeing revenues running $15-20B higher…on top of what we were seeing. On the other hand, social security recipients get a 1.7% raise this month…good for around another $1B per month…plus the 10k people who retire every day. I shouldn’t even throw a number out but what the heck. I’ll throw my dart at a $10B deficit for this month. Last month, my initial prediction was $30B deficit and we ended up with a $21B surplus….let’s see how this month ends up.
