U.S. Budget and Economy

As stated in my prior post, the gross federal debt may give a better indication of our pending liabilities than the debt held by the public. To be more precise, however, the gross federal debt includes the debts that are currently owed to trust funds which will help deal with those liabilities. It gives no indication of liabilities that are not covered by those debts. For example, the following table can be found on page 8 of the Summary of the 2007 Annual Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund Reports : KEY DATES FOR THE TRUST FUNDS OASI DI OASDI HI ----- ----- ----- ----- First year outgo exceeds income excluding interest................ 2018 2005 2017 2007 First year outgo exceeds income including interest................ 2028 2013 2027 2011 Year trust fund assets are exhausted 2042 2026 2041 2019 OASI refers to the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, DI refers ...

Regardless of the significance of the deficit, the federal debt is arguably more critical. Afterall, it is the debt, not the deficit, that we are paying interest on every year. The following graph shows selected measures of the U.S. deficit according to the just-released budget: The red line is the "gross federal debt" and the blue line is the "debt held by the public". These debts are currently about 9.3 trillion dollars and 5.2 trillion dollars, respectively, and are related in that the gross federal debt is equal to the debt held by the public plus "intragovernmental holdings". This intragovernmental debt is chiefly held by trust funds with a bit more than half of it being held by the Social Security trust fund. A list of these trust funds, along with the actual numbers and sources for the graph above can be found at http://www.econdataus.com/debt09.html . There is some dispute about whether the gross federal debt or the debt held by the public ar...

President Bush's 2009 Budget was released on Monday, February 4th. The following graph shows selected measures of the U.S. deficit according to that budget: The most commonly discussed measure of the deficit is the unified deficit, shown in purple. The graph shows the actual values of the unified deficit through 2007 and projected values from 2008 forward. In addition, the dotted purple line shows the projected values of the unified deficit from last year's budget. The actual numbers and sources can be found at http://www.econdataus.com/def09.html . As can be seen, the unified deficit for 2007 is $82 billion less than was projected in the prior budget. However, the outlook for the next two years has greatly worsened. The prior budget projected that the deficit would gradually decline, reaching a small surplus of $61 billion in 2012. It is now projected to worsen by over $200 billion per year for the next two years and then decline rapidly, still reaching a small surplus ...

This blog is connected with the web site at http://www.econdataus.com/budget.html . The main purpose of that web site is to organize and present budget and economic data and provide their sources. The purpose of this blog will be to add some commentary and perhaps to promote some discussion of that data.