How the Federal Budget Deficit Doubled in a Single Year

How the Federal Budget Deficit Doubled in a Single Year

• It's not the first time that has happened, but there are key differences about what happened this year.

"...This year will likely be added to that list. The Congressional Budget Office last week projected that the federal government will post a deficit of $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends on September 30...

• The drivers of this year's rising deficit are four-fold, and three of them are the result of decades of poor policymaking: rising interest costs on the $33 trillion national debt, higher Social Security outlays, and more Medicare spending. As Axios points out, those three categories added more than $390 billion to the deficit relative to last year—a tremendous jump in a single year.
• The fourth category is falling federal income tax revenue, which is responsible for about $171 billion of the added deficit this year versus last...