The US Budget Deficit
We had some discussion of the federal budget deficit at the Rutgers auctions conference I went to recently, and how putting various pieces of spending off-budget makes it hard to know what the budget is. A better measure than the official deficit, then, would be the change in the level of government debt held by the private sector. (A lot of federal government debt is held by the federal government itself, and we’d want to subtract that out, since if it increases, so do government assets by the exact same amount.) I looked the debt up in the Economic Report of the President (the latest one, I suppose) and calculated the Deficit column in the table I show here.
The biggest surplus, 290 billion, was just when Bush took office. Recession, war, and tax cuts then increased it, as well as increasing spending on health care.