Washington’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine and The 2024 Election

Here’s one which will make you hair stand on end. The US Treasury just closed the books on FY 2023, bringing the four-year cumulative deficit to $9.0 trillion!

That’s right. During the last 1,460 days (FY 2020 thru FY 2023), Uncle Sam has generated $6.2 billion of red ink, each and every day including weekends, holidays and snow-days. For anyone keeping score at home, that’s also $4.2 million of red ink per minute.

For purpose of perspective, here’s how long it took to generate the first $9 trillion of US government debt. To wit, it took all of 43 presidents and 219 years to reach $9 trillion of public debt in July 2007. So the national debt clock has now accelerated to hyper-drive.

Market Value Of Public Debt Outstanding, 1940 to July 2007

And, yes, we do mean accelerate. It turns out that when you remove the budgetary Mickey-Mouse from the numbers, the Federal deficit for FY 2023 clocked in at over $2.0 trillion or double the comparable level in FY 2022.  The reported numbers, of course, do not look quite as alarming, posting at $1.4 trillion last year and $1.7 trillion this year.

But as the Wall Street Journal cogently explained this AM, that comparison is very misleading because it includes a $380 billion budgetary shuffle between the two years. It seems that Sleepy Joe’s student debt cancellation got recorded as a cost in September 2022, but then got cancelled by the courts in FY 2023, turning it into a giant “savings”!