Fire-Hose Spending

The current United States government is addicted to profligate spending.  It is behaving like a young tyke in a candy store without parental controls.  In the first five months of fiscal 2013 (begins Oct. 1^st, 2012) our government spent $30.5 billion more than in the same period of fiscal 2012 … see: CNS News Story.  If this rate of fire-hose federal spending continues, our deficit for the entire 2013 fiscal year will increase by $73.2 billion over last year’s number.  This would take our deficit for 2013 to $1.400 trillion instead of its budgeted number (in Congress’s continuing resolution) of $901 billion (see: Federal Budget - FY 2013).  This would mean that the Obama administration would have overspent its credit card limit this year by one-half a trillion dollars! 

Now, even with the recent $43 billion spending sequester, I think that it is well-neigh impossible for our Administration spendthrifts to meet the budgetary goals that Congress had established for them.  And I also suspect that much of the current well-touted spending cuts are just desperate Administration attempts to get back on the track set for them by Congress last year … and blaming these inflated cuts on the sequester.  Neil Cavuto’s green-eye-shade people (from Fox News) have already estimated that, if all the spending cuts being advertised by Obama were to take place, they would add up to ten-times even that phony $85 billion sequester amount.  Q.E.D.

Yes, if the Obama Administration pares back second-half spending by even close to a half a trillion dollars, we surely will go back into a recession (blamed on the Republicans, of course).  And if it doesn't meet it budgetary constraints, it will have some serious explaining to do late next fall.  Little Timmy Geithner got out of town just in the nick of time.  

This cannot all end well.

Afterward:  I keep asking myself why did our government so overspend in the first half of this fiscal year?  Were they setting the Republicans up to be blamed for the humongous cuts they would have to make this spring and summer?  My wife suggests that they were perhaps greasing the skids, money-wise, for a Democrat victory in November?  Maybe a bit of both ...

After-Afterward:  What I didn't account for in the above analyses is the additional revenue that would be coming into the government due to the three tax increases that occurred at the start of this calendar year (to a 30% rate on earners over $400,000, Obamacare taxes, and a 2 percentage point increase on payroll taxes).  I can't imaging that these three tax increases total more tan $100 billion for this fiscal year (see: Wall Street Journal Article) ... so we still have around a $400 billion nut to crack.