Posted on 10/19/2026 9:13:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The U.S. finished the 2026 fiscal year with a budget deficit of nearly $2 trillion, the latest measurement to underscore the extent of the country’s financial stress.
The $1.992 trillion figure was about 12% higher than the $1.775 trillion deficit in the prior fiscal year, the Treasury Department reported Friday.
It’s the third-highest annual deficit in U.S. history, behind only 2020 and 2021, when the federal government was doling out trillions of dollars in financial stimulus amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2026 fiscal year saw record sums for both receipts and outlays, according to a Treasury Department official.
With Friday’s release, the U.S. officially recorded its 25th straight fiscal year operating at a deficit. The government last recorded a surplus — meaning its revenues were larger than debts — in 2001.
Friday’s report offers fresh evidence of how the U.S.’s fast-growing debt pile has dragged on the nation’s overall financial health. The rising debt bill has helped exacerbate angst among bond traders, who sent the 10-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury yields to 24-year highs last week.
Medicare was the second biggest contributor, costing almost $1.1 trillion for the fiscal year. By comparison, the government-run healthcare program required slightly under $1 trillion in fiscal 2025.
Net interest – a calculation of the Treasury’s gross interest minus the interest it receives – also topped $1 trillion for the fiscal year. In the 2025 fiscal year, net interest totaled $970 billion.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Oh.
Well, will I still get my $5000 from President Trump if the Repubs win the election?
/s
That 12%, that is the real inflation rate
I don’t give a flying EFF about that right now. Anyone who gets worked up about this is an idiot. We have to repair the years of damage done by Biden.
Trump is trying to get the economy working so we can dig our way out.
This is just a pathetic attempt by the jackass CNBC to create some kind of pre-election stir. But we’ll have people freak out on this, right on cue, right on this very website.
While ago, SS ran surplus and that was counted against deficit. Now, SS is drawing that IOU’s down, so it is generating bigger deficit.
This is the only real issue. Restore sound money and most other problems go away.
Really matters not now I just demand I get what I paid into SS and want it now.
Winning ! /s
Main drivers of the FY2026 deficit
Spending growth and the deficit are dominated by:
• Mandatory entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid together accounted for the bulk of the large programmatic increases (combined rise of ~$217–218 billion). Social Security was the single largest outlay (~$1.67 trillion). These are formula-driven programs whose costs rise with more beneficiaries, higher average benefits (including COLAs), and healthcare inflation/enrollment. 
• Net interest on the debt: Rose ~$115 billion (11%) to ~$1.14 trillion (net); gross interest hit a record ~$1.36 trillion (+12%). This is now one of the top spending categories, driven by the size of the existing debt stock (> $40 trillion) and interest rates. 
• Defense/military outlays rose ~$48 billion (~5%).
“Social Security Expenses”....is kinda misleading...FICA taxes currently cover 86% of SSA outlays with the remaining $200 Billion being drawn from the $2.3 Trillion SSA trust fund. So Social Security is 100% self-funded. The confusion comes because the SSA trust fund is invested in T-Bills that must be paid by the Feds like every other T-Bill bought by the public or pension funds or banks, etc.. So the “SSA expense” is really just part of the “interest on the national debt”.
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4a1.html
Where were the cuts in spending? Not the money held back from some of the programs uncovered by DOGE, but permanent cuts via Congress.
And Trump wants to spend $1.5 trillion on defense? Oh, that money will be spent, regardless of whether anything actually comes out of it. Aka: https://www.military.com/armys-533-million-ammo-factory-failed-to-produce-a-single-usable-shell
After the mid terms, Trump should wield his veto pen with reckless abandon. Something needs to turn on spending.
The country is in a death spiral of violence, debt, disease and corruption. Stay prayed up, watch for the coming of the Lord.
They could start to shave off some of the excesses if they stop driving jeep grand cherokees and other equally expensive vehicles.
Pathetic.
Fiscal years per government accounting always run from Oct 1 through Sept 30.
The final books on the 2026 government year closed. Another 2 TRILLION in debt. Growth of 12% in the size of the deficit.
Should this not be reported? Is reporting it somehow wrong?
Grow up.
He is the FIRST President in perhaps history to preside over a real 10% reduction in the federal workforce, not just small single number percentage points in a single year that are regained the next year.
And Trump's efforts on tariffs to both reduce asymmetrical and unfair trade as well as the overarching goal of re-shoring our industrial base (bringing it back to the US where it has spent more than 60 years leaving this country to go overseas. That is having a huge impact. Like you, I don't like seeing New York or Maryland getting contracts, but the sub repair facility that will be built in Maryland is severely needed, and at this point, we shouldn't care who gets that. All the other things in the pipeline due to reinvestment in bringing industry back to our shores are happening on a daily basis. Things that aren't flashy, like electrical transformers for the power grid we have had to buy from Communist China. We are beginning again to produce those things here.
And we MUST build our industrial base back. Trump is the ONLY President who has focused on this, and succeeded.
WE CANNOT CUT SPENDING AND TAX OUR WAY OUT OF THIS DEBT. We can't. Our only path is to grow our way out. And Trump has a plan to do just that.
Reducing bureucratic overhead is also something Trump has done that he gets no credit for. In calendar year 2025 (Trump’s first full year after taking office on January 20, 2025), the Federal Register dropped sharply to roughly 60,900–61,600 pages from the 2024 record high of 106,109 pages under Biden—a reduction of about 42–43% (roughly 44,500–45,200 fewer pages).
So, under Biden, the number of pages (again, serving as a proxy for the amount of government red tape and regulation) hit a historic high of 106,109 pages.
Trump INTENTIONALLY attacked this issue and reduced it to 61,600 pages. INTENTIONALLY. This broad approach to useless legislation will have the long term effect of making energy cheap via promotion of things like Nuclear Power and oil exploitation of government owned land.
And his crackdown on immigration, both legal and illegal, is saving this country hundreds of billions of real dollars a year.
Add to that the serious crackdown on fraud, and all that adds up to real money.
It isn't Trump's fault that America has neglected real reform. He isn't to blame for this, though he may be advocating for a huge increase in defense spending to begin building the Golden Dome system, which is an enormous expenditure, but is needed, in my opinion.
What needs to happen is we should not be spending our time bashing Trump over this. We should be concentrating on keeping Republicans in power long enough so that we can achieve some of these goals and show real progress.
“Fought on my behalf”?
Huh? By tapping keyboards, doing loony numerology, and keeping the lizard men from Mars at bay?
No. That’s the impact of having to REPAY Tariff receipts. That was a $300B swing. Although, you won’t read that in this stupid, biased article.
A lot more than you, fat ass.
I have been standing out for 20 years, traveling to Washington DC dozens of times to counterprotest these Leftist douchebags like you, standing out in front of Walter Reed, and on the Mall trying to stand up to them.
I took public office in my town and joined the Republican Town Committee to get involved and to try to have an effect. I have been standing out every week for about the past month, and will do so twice a week leading up to Election Day, and I will stand in front of the polling place from 7 AM to 7 PM.
What have you done? Nothing, I’ll wager. Furthermore, I get the stench that you are a re-tread on this website, having been kicked off. That is at best. Otherwise, I suspect you are simply a Leftist coming here under not-so-transparent pretenses to disrupt discourse on this site.
And the fact that you dismiss actual statistics that dimwits like you are too stupid to even digest as “loony numerology” indicts yourself in the eyes of the good people on this website who take the time and make the effort to understand what is going on in our nation.
I’ve been sending money to this site for 15 years, so I have skin in the game. What have you done, jackoff? You are, for all appearances, a freeloader and a parasite on this forum that I treasure and have made so many friends from, dozens whom I have met in person and value greatly.
You aren’t one of them.
You just appear here, and have insulted me from day one, never mind your constant negative posts attempting to bring people down without a single constructive idea.
I try to be polite to people, and have done reasonably well keeping it civil over the years. But I am sick of the influx of turds like you.
If you had been the least bit interested in civil discourse you wouldn’t have started your inane post with insulting “Pathetic” and ended it with the condescending “Grow up”.
You want to dish it out, but puss out when someone hands your crap back to you. Why they let pieces of crap like you hang out and drag things down is a mystery.
I detest people like you. And our country has a lot of them, almost all we regard as enemies of this Republic.
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