Posted on 10/22/2022 12:30:15 AM PDT by fluorescence
The U.S. federal budget deficit fell by half for the 2022 financial year as once-aggressive pandemic relief spending dried up and receipts surged, the Treasury Department said on Friday.
The gap between what the government spent and what it collected tumbled to $1.375 trillion at the end of September, down from the 2021 deficit of $2.776 trillion.
"Today’s joint budget statement provides further evidence of our historic economic recovery, driven by our vaccination effort and the American Rescue Plan," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. "It also demonstrates President Biden’s commitment to strengthening our nation’s fiscal health."
Deficits in the past two years skyrocketed as Congress approved an unprecedented amount of spending to prop up the economy during the pandemic.
Critics noted the bulk of the deficit reduction stemmed from the phasing out of COVID-19 relief spending, including the massive $1.9 trillion package that Democrats unanimously passed last year and that experts say contributed to the spending-fueled inflation spike in the U.S.
The decline also would have been steeper if it were not for the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan: Education Department spending for the year totaled $639.4 billion, $408 billion higher than the estimate.
In September alone, the Education Department spent $445 billion, more than the combined monthly spending amounts from the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, plus the Social Security Administration.
The bulk of that money – about $430 billion – stemmed from President Biden's student loan cancellation program, which will wipe out as much as $20,000 in debt per borrower.
"In fact, the deficit would have been almost $400 billion lower had the Biden administration not decided to enact an inflationary, costly and regressive student debt cancellation plan in August," Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee For a Responsible Budget, said in a statement. "It should be no surprise that the Federal Reserve is having a hard time getting inflation under control when fiscal policymakers keep making their job even harder with more borrowing."
this is the old peter to pay paul gig...
Nothing on the giveaways.
https://mises.org/library/living-reality-military-economic-fascism
and the size of the debt....the rest of the story...
Try that with your Visa and MasterCard.
Why did not they say that it was brought down to zero? If one is goint to lie..... lie.
That’s just the on the books deficit.
It does not include all the loan guarantees, the Fannie & Freddy loans, agency transactions, FDIC Insurance, ERISA Pension Guarantees, and much more off the book debt.
Even the deficit in Social Security tax revenues over payments must be filled by the government repaying some of the Trust Funds they borrowed.
It’s a house of cards, soon to collapse.
Add the student loan forgiveness to the deficit as it is a loss of accounts receivable revenue.
$31 trillion in debt is $3.1 trillion at 10% interest.
Total US Revenue for thr USA for 2022 (excluding Social Security Payroll Taxes) was $3.41 trillion.
You do the math. We cannot even afford to pay the interest on our debt at the current inflation rate with 100 % of our tax revenues.
Keep in mind that Social Security is now running at a deficit!
$408 billion in loan forgiveness costs in the last 12 months?
Sorry, I do not believe that.
I think the author of the U.S. Treasury press release, or the author of the Fox Business link, has confused (perhaps deliberately) the temporary suspension of student loan re-payments with loan forgiveness.
Actually, even suspended loan re-payments during the last 12 months would not add up to $408.
We need more information about the $408 billion of un-budgeted spending at the Department of Education.
The student loan forgiveness has not happened yet, so it’s not in the current deficit, only the projections.
About projections, figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
I want some of what she is smoking! It’s not in the historical figures.
“”In fact, the deficit would have been almost $400 billion lower had the Biden administration not decided to enact an inflationary, costly and regressive student debt cancellation plan in August,””
So the US is $1.4T deeper in debt this fiscal year. Try this with your own household budget.
Only $1.38T in bad checks...
Reducing the deficit is asinine talk like it’s a good thing.
There should never be a deficit period.
I think most of us were alive when the entire budget was less than this deficit.
That’s still about $3T more in spending than we should have.
And that would mean a lot of government folks out of a job.
Last year I spent a million more than I made. This year I spent only $500,000 more than I made. Media celebrates my financial genius. This is just like the great job Brandon is doing with gas prices. The media is the enemy.
This is exactly the same trash scam obama ran. Remember the US runs on a fiscal year of Oct 1 through Sept 30 the following year. Trumps last FY responsibility was the first 8 months of the first Bidet year. That’s why he (and Obama) slammed trillions of dollars of spending into the first few months . . . it was intended to inflate the last budget “deficit” baseline of the previous administration to show a phantom “cut” in their first years.
So they’re only spending $1.37 trillion that they don’t have, this year. Wow, let’s all go buy a bunch of stuff on credit that we can’t afford, you know, to celebrate.
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