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What’s the deficit, really?

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In October 2013, I noted that the U.S. national debt leapt over $300 billion – the day after they raised the debt ceiling. It went from $16.75 trillion to $17.08 trillion, just days after President Obama had publicly lied that “…raising the debt ceiling…is not raising our debt. This does not add a dime to our debt.”

Update: Today, the U.S. national debt is about $18.01 trillion (or as this post is being written, $18,005,549,328,561.45).

$18 trillion! Up from $10.63 trillion when Obama took office on January 21, 2009. The Obama administration is 70% of the way to doubling the U.S. national debt – and still has two years to run!

But here’s the fishy part. Officially, the U.S. budget deficit for FY2014 was only $483 billion. If that’s true, our debt should have gone up a lot less. It should be just over $17.5 trillion.

There are two basic ways to measure the deficit.

  1. The official number: What the government budget states as revenue minus spending.
  2. The reality check: What the government had to borrow, to actually pay its bills.

Let’s take a look at the second one. I don’t have the exact numbers for the U.S. national debt for FY2014’s beginning vs. ending. But it should be obvious that, with the debt increasing by about $1 trillion from late October 2013 to end of November 2014, the real FY2014 deficit (covering twelve months from start of October 2013 to end of September 2014) had to be something larger than $483 billion. Otherwise, the FY2015 deficit would have to be $500 billion in just the last two months alone; and it isn’t.

So if an Obama supporter tries to say “The Dear Leader has reduced the deficit to $483 billion!”, you say: Then why did the national debt rise by roughly a trillion, over that same period? BALONEY.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has found yet another way of lying to us. I’m becoming convinced that all of the ‘headline’ statistics put out by this administration are manipulated to the point where they’re a fraud, at least partly.

Comments

  1. No doubt about it, Jeff. To be fair, the republicans cooked the numbers too but this administration has taken cooking the books to a new art form.

    It’s important to remember that the democrats and republicans only get away with this because we no longer have a “watch dog” press in this once great nation.

  2. Richard Bell is correct.

    It is a typical tactic of liberals and Democrats (and others, but nowhere near the same degree, since conservatives and Republicans don’t hold to moral relativism) to say, “Well, you do it too!”

    They use medically necessary abortions to justify partial birth abortions, which is never medically necessary.

    They use decades old information about racism to justify Affirmative Action, which is racism in reverse; and opposition to voter ID laws.

    And here, they use the fact that Republicans use the same financial hiding tactics that were first started during Democrat administrations (go back and check it out. Most of this started under FDR) to justify taking it to an extreme never seen before.

  4. The deficit is a Tinker-Toy number which is constantly manipulated in order to distract from the actual ocean sized “fiscal gap” which is the true measure of nation’s indebtedness.

    Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns (Aug 8, 2012) wrote:

    The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using the Congressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

    It is far easier to have a micro-debate over the size of the elusive deficit in the age of continuing budget resolutions than it is to confront the (macro) fiscal debt which both parties have to feed like the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors.Kolikoff and Burns warn:

    Closing the gap using taxes requires an immediate and permanent 64 percent increase in all federal taxes. Alternatively, the U.S. needs to cut, immediately and permanently, all federal purchases and transfer payments, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, by 40 percent. Or it can mix these terrible fiscal medicines with honey, namely radical fiscal reforms that make the economy much fairer and far stronger. What the government can’t do is pay its bills by spending more and taxing less.

    We have added Obamacare to the mix and we are about to add millions of illegal immigrants to the welfare rolls. The fiscal gap is “growing like Topsy” and so far as the knowledge of the general public is concerned, it doesn’t exist.

    We have fed the fires of US currency devaluation at the rate of $85 Billion dollars a month through funny money issued from the FED “let’s pretend” checkbook.

    European-style socialism has created similar fiscal gaps across the EU nations with Greece being the main lemming to have staggered and nearly collapsed under the weight of bankruptcy.

    My yardman of many years has dissolved his business. However, he has agreed to take care of me on a strictly cash basis as an “understanding” between friends. He not only has a full schedule of “friends” he is helping out, he has also found a Mexican to bring along to work with him.

    He has undoubtedly calculated his personal tax burdens and decided to live as far away from the tax grid as he can get. Why should he be a cheerleader in the Joe Biden club where paying higher taxes is patriotic?

  5. I am supersized Jeff forgot about the unfunded liabilities. Leftists say that giving amnesty would bring in a few billion in revenue but they would cost trillions in welfare. I am conservative because if genetics has anything to do with longevity I will outlast the system.

  6. #5. “My yardman of many years has dissolved his business. However, he has agreed to take care of me on a strictly cash basis as an “understanding” between friends. He not only has a full schedule of “friends” he is helping out, he has also found a Mexican to bring along to work with him.”

    My Congressman is under a 20 count federal indictment for doing what your yardman is doing. Congressman Michael Grimm (R), who I ran against this past election cycle, is accused of “paying illegals off the books,” “not paying payroll taxes,” etc., etc., etc., while running a restaurant in Manhattan before becoming a Congressman.

    How can we expect to get control of our now, $250,000,000,000,000.00 debt including unfunded mandates if the people running the government and the citizens that are able get off the tax grid? What will likely happen is more tyranny in government forcing certain sectors/communities to pay up by any means necessary.

  8. “Well, you do it too!” This reminds me of the black congresswoman busted for taking a house in DC worth millions as a bribe and saying white congressmen get away with breaking the rules by sleeping on cots in their offices to be cheap. Oddly there are several jobs where people sleep “actual sleep sleeping” at their place of work firemen, EMTS, Doctors and other healthcare personnel can sleep at work when on call or doing a “firemans shift”.

  9. It is far easier to have a micro-debate over the size of the elusive deficit in the age of continuing budget resolutions than it is to confront the (macro) fiscal debt

    That goes back to the unfunded liabilities, again a great point.

    More immediately, I would like to understand the accounting mechanics a little better: what tricks they used to come in with a deficit number of $483 billion, when they clearly had to borrow a trillion or so to cover the FY2014 period. If anyone knows something about it, feel free to enlighten us!

  10. what tricks they used to come in with a deficit number of $483 billion, when they clearly had to borrow a trillion or so to cover the FY2014 period.

    Just a guess: They “imputed” a lot of “income” as if it passed through their hands.

    You are looking for the formula, I suspect. A forensic accountant would be looking at how they fiddled the numbers.

    This boils down to: Who you going to believe, our accounting claims or your lying calculator?