The cliché holds that a picture is worth a thousand words. But a recent chart from the Congressional Budget Office is worth nearly 2,000,000,000,000 (that’s two trillion) words. It illustrates the size of the budget deficits Washington continues to run, year in, year out.
The downward trend of the chart, which shows budget deficits for 2023 and the fiscal year that ended on September 30, echoes the downward trend of our nation’s fiscal trajectory, as lawmakers’ unabated desire to spend money we don’t have jeopardizes our national security — and our future.
Little Budgetary Improvement
The chart comes from a CBO report summarizing the federal government’s budgetary status in the fiscal year just concluded. Excluding the effects of timing shifts (i.e., when payments get transferred from one fiscal year to another because the fiscal year ends during a weekend), the CBO calculated the deficit for fiscal year 2024 as $1.9 trillion.
As large and as incomprehensible as that amount sounds, it actually represents a (very small) improvement from fiscal year 2023. As previously explained last fall, taking out the accounting effects of student loan “forgiveness” — the CBO recorded the Biden administration’s proposal as spending over $300 billion in fiscal year 2022, then recorded the same amount as “savings” when the Supreme Court struck down the plan last year — the federal government ran a $2 trillion deficit in 2023.
But as the dashed pink line in the above chart demonstrates, the $110 billion change in the federal government’s
