The headlines this morning are all about the new Congressional Budget Office prediction that the budget deficit next year (FY 2004) will approach $500 billion--far above the previous 1992 record of $290 billion. This is supposed to be a deadly blow to the White House.
There’s just one problem. Once you cut out all the fancy counting methods, and think of the bugdet deficit as the annual change in the government’s debt (the old fashioned definition), we can see that the $500 billion mark has been reached and passed in the first 10 months of FY 2003. Using the Treasury’s Debt to the Penny site, we come up with a current fiscal year deficit in 2003 at: $558,258,251,367. At current spending rates, another two months could add another $100 billion or so.
