Forbes Magazine
The deficit trolls came out in force in response to my two recent posts (take a look at the comments here and here) about the precipitously dropping federal deficit. In traditional online troll-like behavior, they either flat out refused to believe me, said the government was lying, said I was drinking the Kool-Aid, showed an extreme lack of knowledge about federal borrowing or repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t understand the difference between the deficit and debt.
The final numbers for 2014 announced yesterday by the U.S. Treasury show the federal deficit for the fiscal year that just ended did indeed fall as precipitously as I previously reported. As the report shows, the actual 2014 deficit was $483 billion, $3 billion less than what the Congressional Budget Office estimated a week ago.
For the record, $483 billion is $197 billion below the almost $680 billion deficit recorded in 2013. It’s also $930 billion, that is, close to $1 trillion, less than the largely recession-caused $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009. (Attention trolls: the Congressional Budget Office projected in early 2009, that is, before the start of the Obama administration, that, because of the recession, the deficit that year would be $1.2 trillion.)
In dollar terms, 2014 was the lowest federal deficit since 2008. And in the category most important to economists – the deficit as a percent of Gross Domestic Product – the 2014 deficit was 2.8 percent of GDP, the smallest since 2007.
Read more at Forbes Magazine