Investor's Business Daily Is Fed Up

[Guest SUNTZU]

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- A Red (Ink) Letter Day For Gov't: $1,000,000,000,000 In 8 Months

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Drowning In IOUs

Just since Sept. 1, when the federal fiscal year began, our leaders have written $1,000,000,000,000 in new IOUs for our children and grandchildren to struggle under. It took two centuries from the nation's founding until the early 1980s for Washington to overspend by a cumulative total of a trillion dollars. We have just accomplished the same feat in eight months.

We have never seen a number anything like this. Even amid the often irresponsible spending of the last decade, when the largest deficit ever was recorded, the high-water mark was $458 billion last year.

Under normal circumstances, average citizens should have no need to pay attention to bureaucratic reports in Washington.

Wednesday afternoon at 2 p.m. Eastern time, the Monthly Treasury Statement — essentially the federal government's monthly accounting report — will be released. How much did we spend in May? How much did we take in in taxes? What was the shortfall (or surplus)?

This is a report usually noticed by only the bond markets and public finance nerds.

On Wednesday, however, all vigilante citizens should pause to take note of the government's May numbers.

What will we learn? In April, which is always one of Uncle Sam's strongest months because of the flood of April 15 checks, the government still reported a monthly net outflow of $21 billion, and the deficit for the year stood at $802 billion.

The two previous months, which are more representative of the state of current overspending, the feds saw monthly deficits of $194 billion and $192 billion, respectively.

It is likely that today, when we add in another month of overspending, we will discover either that the annual deficit for fiscal year 2009 ticked beyond $1 trillion by May 31, or we will be able to project that it has done so some time in the 10 days since.

vig⋅i⋅lan⋅te

[vij-uh-lan-tee] Show IPA –noun 1. a member of a vigilance committee. 2. any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime.

–adjective 3. done violently and summarily, without recourse to lawful procedures: vigilante justice.

[Sheepdog]

One of the best Freudian slips ever...