One recurring theme of the HOTLINE over the years has been that the budget deficit is driven by excess spending, not any shortage of tax revenues.

We just analyzed the preliminary fiscal numbers for FY2024 – which ended on September 30.

The two charts below show that revenues were way up. But even with record tax collections, the deficit was up. Why? Because spending exploded again in 2024. Expenditures were up by more than $600 billion and by 10%.

Sorry, this story gets worse. Here is what the Congressional Budget Office tells us about these godawful numbers:

Outlays in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were affected because October 1 (the first day of fiscal years 2023 and 2024, respectively) fell on a weekend. As a result, certain payments were shifted into the prior fiscal year–$63 billion from 2023 into 2022 and $72 billion from 2024 into 2023. If not for those shifts, the deficit in 2024 would have been 13 percent larger–instead of 8 percent larger–than it was in 2023.

We had our Cracker Jack number crunchers recalculate the numbers adjusting for these timing shifts.

If an evil leader were to take over our country and his nefarious plot was to bankrupt the country, he couldn’t do it much better than Joe Biden.